[Tim Jones]

Hi Clark,

All of the LTO-5 drives work the same for compatibility and, in our QA labs, they all perform very similarly when fed the same type of data. The key to your decision should be based upon the support that you may need down the line. While all three vendors (and Tandberg Data) support Windows and (for the most part) Linux, only HP offers true OS X support with their tools and devices (which is why we OEM the HP solutions for our bundles).

If you are running Windows, you’re pretty safe with all of your listed vendors and price will probably be your driving factor, but if you’re on a Mac, you will need to consider how astute you are with the devices. You won’t get OS X support from any of the vendors but HP (and us) currently.

Once you decide on a drive, keep in mind that the quality of your tapes is the most important consideration in the long run. Based on 27 years in this industry, we recommend Fujifilm and HP branded LTO media as the highest quality media for long term storage and low drive head wear.

Tim
—
Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.productionbackup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters!

[Tim Jones]

Hi Jack,

I’m going to try and squeeze in a lot of knowledge here, so you might want to grab a cold one … I am a vendor representative, but I try to be agnostic in my general discussions.

One very important thing to understand about tape – no matter whose – is that it is not disk. While disk is random in access nature, tape is sequential and can only be accessed in the order in which it was written by a single process / system. Additionally, all tapes require software of some sort to support their use on an average computer system – whether Windows, OS X, Linux, Solaris, HP-UX or any other. It just so happens that some OSes have the basics built into to what you receive as part of the environment.

Getting a bit technical for a moment – bear with me – Linux includes the kernel level device drivers for Type 1 SCSI devices (tape drives) and the code required to map those devices into the various data transport layers such as SAS, pSCSI, USB, Thunderbolt, Fibre Channel, and Firewire. For other OSes, some of these are handled while you’ll need to add drivers for others – for example, Linux is relatively self contained. Windows has basic tape support that can be improved by installing the drive vendors’ DLLs. OS X has NO native tape support and you must install some type of software to use tape.

As for tape devices, you must consider your connectivity options – for LTO your choices of connectivity are pSCSI, SAS, and Fibre Channel – the most popular interface currently is SAS (Serially Attached SCSI) due to it’s performance and ease of installation and connectivity. Also, LTO-5 and later are only available in SAS and Fibre Channel. Since you don’t mention your specific platform (and that does make a difference), I’ll speak in generalities.

To connect an LTO drive to your system, you will need an appropriate host bus adapter (HBA) for your drive type – popular brands that support tape are ATTO Technologies, LSI Logic, and (on Linux) Adaptec. There are others, but you should check carefully for tape compatibility and your OS. While any HBA device can support the electrical connectivity required, the I/O protocols for tape are quite different than for disk. If you are using OS X, you can also take advantage of the new options in Thunderbolt connectivity.

As far as using tape. the hot topic right now is LTFS (Linear Tape File System). LTFS is a format definition and set of specialized drivers and a filesystem support module that makes an LTO-5 tape appear to your operating system as a pseudo-disk device. While this sounds good on the surface, please be aware that you will still need to locate and install the drivers appropriate for your platform and, since the project is “open source”, you will need to understand that you may not be able to get tier 1 support if you run into issues unlike other tape software.

Once you do have it working, LTFS will allow you to mount a tape onto your desktop (OS X and Windows) or on an assigned mountpoint (Linux) so that you can use the simple system functions like ‘cp’ (OS X Linux) or ‘copy’ (Windows) to copy files from your system’s disks to the tape and back. They will also allow you to browse the tape content from Finder or Explorer, as well as drag and drop from tape to your system and vice versa. However, because both Explorer and Finder like to get lots of info about the files in a folder as you access the folder, you will become very dissatisfied with this access method because of the time (measured in 10’s of minutes on deeply nested folders) to open a folder caused by the information digging. To alleviate that issue, I recommend accessing the tape contents from the command line (dir, copy, ls, cd, cp) as the delay using those tools is only related to the tape access time. Finally, be aware that LTFS tapes are just like disk in that what you are copying onto them must fit on a single tape (1.43TB) and you cannot span tapes as with other tape software applications. While I’ll admit to being anti-LTFS, I have given it a fair shake and even provided code back to the project to improve where I could. We’ve created an LTFS caveats list that you can view on our website here:

LTFS Caveats Knowledgebase Article

Aside from LTFS, for the best performance and tape media management, I recommend our BRU products (of course 🙂 ) for Linux and OS X and Novastor’s NovaBACKUP for Windows. All very cost effective and proven reliable over 27 years for BRU and 20 years for NovaBACKUP.

I’m now regularly checking in at the Cow, so please feel free to ask any questions about tape, archival, and backup that you have.

Tim
—
Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group Inc.
https://www.productionbackup.com
BRU … Because it’s the RESTORE that matters