Jerzy Zbyslaw
Forum Replies Created
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[Sam Lee] “Should I wait for LTO-9 instead?”
LTO8 came out in Dec 2017 and with a 2-2.5 yearly refresh cycle there’s a possibility LTO9 may come out as early as the end of this year or as late as the middle of next year.
[Sam Lee] “Downside is having to spend about $5K for a new LTO-8 Thunderbolt 3 interface drive.”
You could purchase it now but I’d hold off until the middle of next year if you can, the other alternative if you do go ahead now is that LTO8 can use the LTO7 tapes formatted as Type M as they cost the same but the amount you can store will increase from 6TB to 9TB but the disadvantage is that most likely only LTO8 drives will be able to read Type M tapes but we won’t know for sure one way or the other until LTO9 is actually released and its specifications and capabilities will also be available at that time.
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Looks like the legal dispute is over as companies Sony and Fujifilm have both agreed to stop arguing, however, they will both need to get their respective LTO8 media certified and it will take months before the backlog can be cleared, there’s also a comment that if LTO9 hits at the end of the year as expected then people might just give LTO8 a miss altogether.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/08/06/sony_fujifilm_storage_patent_lawsuit_settled/
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There are none for sale in Australia so I’m guessing this shortage is global but if you have an LTO8 drive then you can use 6TB LTO7 tapes which are USD $60 or instead you can use LTO7 type M ones that store 9TB for $62.
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I don’t see what the big deal with compression is because its transparently done by the drive itself and every drive understands it so there’s no chance that a compressed tape won’t be readable anytime in the future unlike some proprietary compression algorithms some backup programs use. You don’t lose anything by having it on because the drive determines if the data is compressible and if it isn’t it just simply writes out the raw data, either way it writes out a flag to say whether the next record is compressed or not and reading the tape simply involves reading the flag and processing the data by uncompressing it accordingly if needs be. I guess the only negative is if someone gets accustomed to say writing 3TB of compressible data to a 2.5TB LTO6 tape and the next time they try to write out 3TB of uncompressible data to the same tape and then find out it doesn’t fit but other than that there aren’t any other negatives that I can see so perhaps you can advise them their concerns are unfounded, anyway to answer your question try doing what this article here says https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/en/linuxonibm/com.ibm.linux.z.lgdd/lgdd_t_tape_wrk_comp.html however, it may be turned on in LTFS so there may be a setting you may need to clear when you format the tape like this https://i.imgur.com/Hb4fYNs.png
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[Eric Strand] “”I cannot help to acknowledge that as the price of inexpensive NAS products from Synology, QNAP, and Netgear continue to drop in price, the reality that NEAR LINE STORAGE (secondary shared storage with cheaper products) is becoming a viable alternative to LTO tape backup.””
Yes, for the amount of data they store they are perfectly viable, the answer may swing back towards LTO drives, auto loaders and tape libraries if suddenly you need to shoot in 8K and find you may need five to ten times as much storage as before. Realistically though, people will most likely have a mix of both in having a NAS for stuff they are working on and tape for stuff that’s current but inactive at the moment.
[Bob Zelin] “So what do you do with all of your LTO 4 and LTO 5 (and now LTO 6) tapes. You create the LTO 6 archive. You keep it in a storage vault. Your place burns down, and today you can only get LTO 8 drives, which will not read an LTO 4, or LTO 5 or LTO 6. So someone will come back and say “well, that is ridiculous, you can still find LTO 5 and LTO 6 drives out there” – well what about 10 years from now – or even 5 years from now. Can you find an LTO 4 except on eBay ?”
Dell still sell two different models of brand new LTO4 drives so that covers you down to LTO2 tapes https://pilot.search.dell.com/lto%20drive , all higher versions (LTO5+) are also available everywhere else so I don’t see this issue as being a problem at the moment although it may change in the future as you suggest, but I’m guessing that people will still be building old versions of LTO drives well into the future because if they are still going to be priced at four grand apiece the reply to any query is probably going to be “how many of them do you want to buy?”, I don’t know who would still be sitting on LTO1 tapes today as they are only 100GB so I presume a used LTO2 or LTO3 off Ebay would suffice to get the data off those onto something a bit more modern, LTO2 was introduced in 2003 so people have had plenty of time to migrate LTO1 data which was introduced in 2000.
[Bob Zelin] “This is why near line storage is appealing. You keep your near line system with it’s 5 year warrantee drives for 5 – 6 years, and in 5 – 6 years, you buy a NEW SYSTEM (this time with 20 TB drives – because 14 TB drives are out right now for $499 a piece, and in 5 years, I assure you 20 TB drives will be available) – and you migrate your data to the new larger Near line system.”
In theory yes, but the cost of the hard drives on a $ per TB basis since they consolidated to only two main manufacturers is not declining that rapidly, if say a 6TB drive cost $300 and they introduced 8TB and 10TB hard drives they would come in at $400 and $500 respectively, gone are the days when people went crazy buying 1 TB drives and I more wisely would buy two 750GB ones for the exact same price. Hard drive prices have to decline by 50% every 2.0-2.5 years to keep pace with LTO storage density roughly doubling each new generation for pretty much the same price. You can have an 8 bay NAS with 14TB drives or even 20TB drives you mentioned but then if say you need to back up this data a second NAS is going to be expensive whereas I’ve seen a bare LTO8 drive for sale at just under USD $3K and LTO7 type M8 tapes are just under AUD $100 (USD $72.50) and they store 9 TB uncompressed. And then as I mentioned previously if storage requirements blow out for 4K or 8K then this question becomes even more acute if you read the reduser forums at https://www.reduser.net/forum/forum.php on this topic or even on the Reddit Datahoarder forums https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/ where LTO technology is starting to be discussed more and more where people have a need to backup their stuff in the 50TB – 100TB+ range.
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[Melvin Chong] “I just hope somebody will write a backup software that can write to 50 Gb Blu-ray using LTFS one day.”
Pardon! Surely you mean like the packet writing software we used to use on CD’s and DVD’s last century? Where you just insert the disk and format it in a special way and then you read/write to it as if it was a USB Stick? Why can’t you use the packet writing software that has been updated for Blu-rays? Here’s one example where it mentions this if you scroll down to the bottom of the page.
https://www.cyberlink.com/stat/technology/enu/next-gen-disc-solution.jsp
On page 25 of this document Nero’s InCd program formats BD-R’s using UDF 2.6 and BD-RE’s using UDF 2.5 so this is another program that supports packet writing.
ftp://ftp.teicrete.gr/pub/software/nero/user_guides/nero9/incd/InCD_Eng.pdf
I’m reasonably certain there are a few other manufacturers of packet writing software available and if not you have at least these two currently available. Kindly note that deleted space is not recoverable on regular write once Blu-rays but should be on re-writable Blu-ray disks BD-RE’s. If you have this available you don’t really need LTFS for disks, however, recipients of these disks will probably need their own copy of the packet writing software unless the companies release free disk readers for other people to read them and Nero usually gives away a free disk reader by way of download,
Cheers
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As far as I’m aware the layers have never been separately addressable ever, and basically as the DVD-DL is 8.5 GB in size then anything written to it is presumably written to the first layer if < 4.7 GB in size and any overflow is written to the second layer up to its maximum size of 3.8 GB. Its like a hard drive which may have 100,000 tracks and you don’t know what track your data is on as the HDD firmware works it out.
Having said that you could use last century’s technology and write two separate sessions by writing a 4.7 GB session and then a 3.8 GB session as back in the 90’s that is what we used to do to incrementally write data to expensive CD’s and DVD’s at that time. Some multi session Audio CD’s probably still do exist today whereby a music CD is recorded as the first session which is all a CD player ever gets to see and so it plays without problems and the second session might have the bands low-res music video clip and the reason this works is that the PC defaults to the last session. Sony ran into some problems with this when they deployed anti-CD music ripping device drivers which could be used as a rootkit by hackers on some of their music CD’s with dire results. I recommend you don’t do multi-session disks as most people aren’t aware this is possible and are likely to get confused and probably wouldn’t be able to change the session in a PC even if aware the disk is multi-session. I never expect an optical disk to be multi-session and never check for this anyway and would most likely get highly irritated if someone deployed such a disk for me to use these days.
I’m somewhat confused by your original question and even more by your possible reasoning behind it but given optical media is so cheap then your better off burning two separate DVD’s and I’d advise you to give multi-session DVD-DL’s a miss. If there is some other reason behind your request obviously not apparent to me so far then kindly elaborate further and perhaps I can give you another opinion.
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RSYNC is the best free utility to use if available as you can also use the checksum option to make sure the files are identical down to the last byte. https://www.techradar.com/au/how-to/computing/apple/using-rsync-to-keep-your-files-in-sync-1305698
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LTO6 tapes come in two formats MP (Metal Particle) and BaFe (Barrium Ferrite) and LTO6 drives happily accept both versions and I can pretty much confirm that LTO8 drives will not read LTO6 tapes and furthermore I will explain why this is so for two insurmountable reasons that I have gleaned from the internet.
(1) LTO drives cannot tell the difference as to whether a tape inserted into it is either a MP or BaFe tape and as far as it is concerned it is just a tape for that size specified.
(2) LTO8 drives use the new TMR head technology and if you were to use a MP tape in it then it would trash the TMR heads in pretty short order.
Hence taking those two things into account the LTO organization itself made a POLICY DECISION to blanket restrict outright LTO8 drives from ever accepting LTO6 tapes and I presume all LTO drive makers have probably coded up all the firmware on all LTO8 drives to do exactly that. If you want to read old LTO6 tapes you have two choices only in LTO6 or LTO7 drives. Could an LTO8 drive otherwise read an LTO6 BaFe tape? probably yes it could, but its never going to happen, have a read of these links especially the first one.
https://www.storagedna.com/lto8/
https://support.hpe.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?docId=emr_na-lpg50082
It is likely but not confirmed that LTO9 will be able to read LTO7 tapes as there is no longer any reason for them not to do so as all LTO7 tapes were BaFe, it is unknown at this stage whether or not they will ever read Type 8M tapes.
***** if you see any documentation that says an LTO8 drive will accept an LTO6 tape then it is probably incorrect and do not believe it. *****
Cheers
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Don’t know if this suggestion is of any use or not but I’ll have a go but better have a network expert offer a comment on this, anyway I suggest disabling SAMBA, CIFS and SMB and install NFS and have all machines connect to the Linux server via NFS only, you may have to upgrade Windows 10 to I think the enterprise version as that is the only one that supports NFS.