Despite all of this, the scanner gives great results. I have an HP DAT drive. The experience here is very different from the scanner. Integration with NT is seamless. The standard NT backup routines work well with it.
Compression is via hardware inside the drive.
The are a few things to be careful of however. No one tells you this. Documentation is sparse but adequate. One of the disk drives here is a Seagate Barracuda with 4GB of space using a wide SCSI interface. The drive is very fast.