[Jerzy Zbyslaw]

[Tim Jones] “LTO drives have a very specific “green zone” for proper operation”

Thank you for providing this information as I was not aware that this “green zone” even existed as I assumed that since LTO drives and media can operate under a normal office environment that all values of humidity would be allowable but clearly according to that chart the humidity extremes have to be avoided. I do have one question though and I was wondering are these limits presumably originally for MP (metal Particle) tapes and do these same standards also apply to the new BaFe tapes as well or do they have a different range of values for their “green zone” limits?

[Jerzy Zbyslaw]

LTO FC stand alone drives are still readily available although unless someone already has FC in their server then it probably is preferable to buy them new in the SAS format, alternatively people may wish to relocate the drive further away like e.g. 20 or 50 meters which FC cabling allows especially if they do not want the unit close by and having to suffer the equivalent of constant VCR rewinding noise if its operating in the machine right next to you or as an external nearby. As I stated previously I only bought a used FC version on Ebay because it was several hundred dollars cheaper than what an equivalent SAS one would have cost me.

The firm that makes them in both FC and SAS formats is Tandberg Data and these are the FC models currently available (click the “Models” link)

https://www.tandbergdata.com/us/index.cfm/products/tape-drives/lto-drives/lto-5-hh/
3524-LTO LTO-5 HH Internal Drive, FC, Bare LTO-5 HH – Internal bare tape drive kit, black, FC, with Quick Start Guide, Warranty Card, Screws, Black
3530-LTO LTO-5 HH External Drive, FC, Bare LTO-5 HH – External bare tape drive kit, black, FC, with Quick Start Guide, Warranty Card, Screws, Black

https://www.tandbergdata.com/us/index.cfm/products/tape-drives/lto-drives/lto-6-hh/
3536-LTO LTO-6 HH Internal Drive, FC, Bare LTO-6 HH – Internal bare tape drive kit, black, FC, with Quick Start Guide, Warranty Card, Screws, Black
3537-LTO LTO-6HH External Drive, FC, Bare LTO-6 HH – External bare tape drive kit, black, FC, with Quick Start Guide, Warranty Card, Screws, Black

https://www.tandbergdata.com/us/index.cfm/products/tape-drives/lto-drives/lto-7-hh/
TD-LTO7iFC LTO-7 HH Internal Drive, FC, Bare Tandberg Data LTO-7 HH Internal FC tape drive with 3yrs OverlandCare Bronze-Level included

They appear to be relabeled HP drives as they provide mostly HP software for them although I have no idea how different they are but they do identify as TandbergData drives and not HP drives in my PC. I ordinarily would not have considered them for purchase but they make their software and firmware freely available unlike HP who tend to only make that available to you if you have the drive under the current warranty period or otherwise under a service agreement so that definitely is a strong point in Tandberg’s favor especially if like me you buy them second hand.

[Jerzy Zbyslaw]

Regarding “- Less expensive is better unless there’s a good reason” then consider a used device rather than a brand new one and preferably an external as they tend to have less usage than an internal unit.

Regarding “Want to use SAS specifically as a controller” I’d suggest not disregarding FC (fibre channel) as these can be powered by a cheap controller e.g. hundreds of 4Gb’s QLE2462’s on sale for as low as $20 on Ebay and an LC to LC cable can be bought for about $10 to plug into both the controller and an FC tape drive. Faster cards like the 8 Gb’s QLE2562 cost around $100 and 16 Gb’s QLE2662 cost several hundred but neither of these are necessary. The main advantage of FC LTO drives is that they tend to be cheaper than the SAS variants I presume because it is “funkier” technology and non-enterprise orientated people probably aren’t as familiar with them. SAS is better because the controllers tend to be 8 ports so you can also attach other SATA/SAS drives to them whereas the FC card I mentioned only has 2 ports (although a 4 port QLE2464 does exist) and still takes up one computer slot either way. I installed this QLE2462 card into my Windows 7 machine and it installed the drivers automatically without any problems and my used LTO-6 drive works well.

Regarding “Bear in mind if you get LTO6, that you will probably want to migrate at a later date to something better (and faster…)” possibly, but this is only going to be an issue if say you have perhaps more than 100 TB to store or your retrieval time window from tape is a lot smaller.

Regarding “So if you’re writing a very small number of tapes that’s ok, but if you have a larger quantity of data, you will be migrating from a 160 mb/s media to something much faster, thus creating a bottleneck and wasting a lot of time in the process. Not worth skimping on a few hundred quid to get an LTO 7 drive in my opinion.
I am still waiting to invest into LTO7 and have been holding off LTO6.” I don’t see the point in getting an LTO7 over an LTO6 as it’s still 5-6 hours to write a full tape although with LTO6 you will need to do 2.4 times as many operations (6TB Vs 2.5TB) and the main reason is that the cost of tape is the same per terabyte. If anything an LTO8 drive costing three grand as opposed to an LTO7 drive costing two grand is a better bet because firstly you’ll be amortizing the cost over the next several years anyway and an LTO7 cartridge formatted to LTO-8M format holding 9TB is very cheap storage compared to all the other LTO-5/6/7 options available especially if your going to be adding more tens or hundreds of terabytes to tape over these next couple of years.

Regarding “If you can’t afford to buy into a technology, hold off until it becomes affordable or until you can afford it.
Furthermore, LTO8 onwards are NOT compatible with LTO6 by the way, which makes LTO7 all the more attractive right now, as it’s the perfect bridge between past-present and future storage.” That’s mostly an irrelevant point because it really only affect tape libraries storing thousands of tape cartridges which also hold the maximum ten or twenty tape drives and what happens is that they can’t hold any more so when they do upgrade they rip all of those drives out of the library in one go and replace them with LTO-(N+2) drives and proceed to convert all the LTO-N tapes they have over to LTO-(N+2) new tapes. This is not an issue for SOHO users because they can quite comfortably have an LTO6 drive sitting in their PC right next to an LTO8/9/10 drive to solve this supposed problem.

Finally, if using LTO6 give the MP (Metal Particle) tapes a miss and just use the BaFe (Barium Ferrite) ones as they are much better technology in every way for not much more cost.

[Jerzy Zbyslaw]

Minimum LTO speeds are specified in this PDF here https://tapepower.fujifilmrmd.com/Shared/PDF/knowledgebase/LTO6-TECHFLASH-2015.pdf

Probably the easiest way to achieve maximum throughput is to add another hard drive slightly larger in size than the largest tape cartridge you are going to use and simply format this drive before each use and then copy the data to it from your main drive (as long as you don’t write to it in multi-threaded mode which for example the Windows Robocopy command defaults too). The logic behind this is that data will be laid down sequentially on an empty drive (because you previously formatted it) and hence when you read off this drive it will be read back in a sequential manner. On a typical 3TB drive the data starts off at around 200 MB’s on the outer tracks and drops down to around 100 MB’s on the inner tracks. e.g. have a look at the HD Tune 5.0 benchmark here https://www.technologyx.com/pc-hardware/toshiba-dt01aca300-3tb-sata-iii-hdd-review-premium-hdd-storage-for-less-than-0-03gb/2/

If by some chance you would want to maintain the full speed of 160 MB’s you would need to either get something like a 6TB (8TB?/10TB?) hard drive and format into two 3TB partitions and just use the first (outer) partition where 160 MB’s sequential speed is possible https://www.myce.com/review/toshiba-x300-6tb-high-performance-hdd-review-81607/benchmark-results-3/ and this is called “short-stroking” the drive, another advantage not important here is that on a short-stroked drive the heads don’t have far to travel but that is more important for random access and not relevant here for the mainly sequential access usage as you will use. The only other way to have high disk read speeds is to use Raid-0 https://thepcenthusiast.com/wd-red-pro-6tb-nas-drive-review/6/ so you would probably have to purchase two 2TB drives to create a 4TB Raid-0 array which is easily do-able on a SAS controller.

[Jerzy Zbyslaw]

Your best bet would be to create Par 2.0 archives using either Multipar or Quickpar so that if any of the data is missing or unreadable then it can be reconstructed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parchive