3 ms·

I had a room full of servers, many with 16-36 disks per server and had an AC failure. Things turned off as planned, but it hit 115F for a bit. None of the dis

by sliken 7y ago

I had a room full of servers, many with 16-36 disks per server and had an AC failure. Things turned off as planned, but it hit 115F for a bit. None of the disks died, majority of the tapes did.

userbinator 7y ago
That sounds unusual. Tape shouldn't degrade that easily. 115F is 46C, which is hot for a human and not a good temperature for long-term storage, but not anywhere near immediately hazardous to the media. Was it LTO or some other type of tape?
- sliken 7y ago
  LTO, the archival temp is REALLY narrow, only 61-77F. Just google "lto storage temperature" and google will pop up a card based on the IBM data.
  - protomyth 7y ago
    That is the range of temperatures if you are going to be storing the tape for over 6 months.
    - sliken 7y ago
      Yes, note the operational temperature is below 115F as well.
      - protomyth 7y ago
        That's if you are actively trying to do backup.
        sliken 7y ago
        True, I don't remember if the backup software was running. However we lost tapes in the cartridge in the drive (7 tapes I think) and also tapes in other cartridges (banks of 7). I think we had 4 cartridges of 7, then upgraded to a newer robot that had 8 cartridges of 11. At the time I was pretty shocked, and asked around and apparently it wasn't a particularly unusual event. Fortunately we always kept a cartridge rotated out to a different room.
    - sliken 7y ago
      Also keep in mind the monitoring for the room hit 115F, so the temp inside the tape drive/robot might have been over 115F. Similar with the drives, but the drives were fine.
protomyth 7y ago
That is really odd. LTO shouldn't do that. I would actually suspect the actual drive, but you probably got a replacement drive to check. That is well outside my experience. If I remember correctly they should be good to 120F for a little while.
- sliken 7y ago
  Not sure if the tapes were permanently damaged or just had lost data. We ended up switching to a 16 disk server running backuppc. Not nearly the same capacity, but incrementals, deduplication, and compression made up the difference. Also sadly the great price/performance brand with great service (overland) got bought up by the radically more expensive larger company and all the prices doubled 8-(.

by sliken 7y ago

I had a room full of servers, many with 16-36 disks per server and had an AC failure. Things turned off as planned, but it hit 115F for a bit. None of the disks died, majority of the tapes did.

userbinator 7y ago

That sounds unusual. Tape shouldn't degrade that easily. 115F is 46C, which is hot for a human and not a good temperature for long-term storage, but not anywhere near immediately hazardous to the media. Was it LTO or some other type of tape?

sliken 7y ago
LTO, the archival temp is REALLY narrow, only 61-77F. Just google "lto storage temperature" and google will pop up a card based on the IBM data.
- protomyth 7y ago
  That is the range of temperatures if you are going to be storing the tape for over 6 months.
  - sliken 7y ago
    Yes, note the operational temperature is below 115F as well.
    - protomyth 7y ago
      That's if you are actively trying to do backup.
      - sliken 7y ago
        True, I don't remember if the backup software was running. However we lost tapes in the cartridge in the drive (7 tapes I think) and also tapes in other cartridges (banks of 7). I think we had 4 cartridges of 7, then upgraded to a newer robot that had 8 cartridges of 11. At the time I was pretty shocked, and asked around and apparently it wasn't a particularly unusual event. Fortunately we always kept a cartridge rotated out to a different room.
  - sliken 7y ago
    Also keep in mind the monitoring for the room hit 115F, so the temp inside the tape drive/robot might have been over 115F. Similar with the drives, but the drives were fine.

protomyth 7y ago

That is really odd. LTO shouldn't do that. I would actually suspect the actual drive, but you probably got a replacement drive to check. That is well outside my experience. If I remember correctly they should be good to 120F for a little while.

sliken 7y ago
Not sure if the tapes were permanently damaged or just had lost data. We ended up switching to a 16 disk server running backuppc. Not nearly the same capacity, but incrementals, deduplication, and compression made up the difference. Also sadly the great price/performance brand with great service (overland) got bought up by the radically more expensive larger company and all the prices doubled 8-(.