which LTO6 drive to buy?

[Tim Gerhard]

I suppose I forgot about Tandberg. They were bought out by Overland a couple years ago and then Overland was bought out by Sphere3D. Tandberg drives were all HP OEM’d before, but now all LTO7+ are IBM OEM’d. Quantum is the dominating force when it comes to standalone drives these days, they do the large volumes, and have the lowest prices for new product from my experience.

I remember trying to buy the Tandberg LTO5 FC Internals, but the lead times were astronomical. I checked all the distributors for the newer drives and 0 stock. I think Tandberg is only around for the loyal German market these days with their merged Overland NEOS Tandberg T series libraries.

Tandberg also probably the only company that still toots about using RDX. Must be popular in Europe, because it’s almost nearly abandoned in the US.

Tim Gerhard
Magnext
614-433-0011 x114
tgerhard@magnext.com

[Jon Allen]

Hi Rachel, I will share you my 3 month mark report from trying LTO. I chose LTO6 because its the cheapest per TB and I have a closet to store the tapes. I can understand if you are paying per square inch in a data centre why LTO7 or 8 might make more sense but there is still a higher price per TB of the media. Its the same media, its just that they use the extra profit to fund R&D. If you are a non business user like me it makes more sense to go with -6. Plus you will have more pieces of media per TB, meaning you reduce the impact of data loss from any single cartridge failing.

I got an internal HP LTO6 + generic SAS enclosure from Discount Data Mart (on ebay and the web) in Washington state. The seller Todd was very friendly and helpful. Gave me a special price just for calling. The bezel/faceplate of the drive had a small crack when it arrived and he arranged for a replacement to be sent out immediately which I changed out myself in a few minutes.

The best prices on media are at backupworks.com, they have good service and only sell new media. Some sellers mix new and recertified media and this can cause problems down the road. I pay $25 usd for factory fresh Fuji BaFe LTO6.

Given that all generations of LTO drive are easily obtainable and serviced by multiple independent companies, it is not valid to argue for future compatibility by buying LTO7. When you are ready to upgrade you will use your drive to offload the tape data to disk, and then back out again to whatever future technology you choose.

Re: Software – I went with BRU PE because it does not use the buggy LTFS, instead it uses their own file system with extra redundancy checking. They were having some issues with Apple’s updates breaking certain things but its fixed now. In any event as long as you stick to OS 10.12.6 you will be fine.

Re: Noise – if you have not used a tape drive before you will want to get a 5 meter SAS cable to put it behind a door or something. Two motors, one constantly accelerating, one constantly decelerating. Its exquisitely awful.