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Yeah, there is a sharp divide where you can get a LTO-3 drive like Ultrium 920 for as little as $40 used while LTO-5 (first to support LTFS) and newer quickly g
by puzzlingcaptcha 5y ago
Yeah, there is a sharp divide where you can get a LTO-3 drive like Ultrium 920 for as little as $40 used while LTO-5 (first to support LTFS) and newer quickly go into hundreds and thousands of dollars. I actually considered getting an older one but was concerned about continued availability of media.
- smackeyacky 5y agoYou can get the media, but tape software for windows is a nightmare. Windows server 2019 doesn't support tape without hideously expensive 3rd party software or unuseable open source backup "solutions" that presume you have fifty boxes to manage. Linux it works ok though.
- puzzlingcaptcha 5y agoYes, that was my other concern, especially looking at long term storage - would I still find drivers for it (or the SCSI controllers) 10 years down the line. And even Linux has been purging unused/unmaintained drivers lately. As much as I liked the prospect of a little retro-computing side-project I ended up just burning a dozen BD-XL discs instead. Wouldn't really work for large volumes of data but this was just a personal backup.
- smackeyacky 5y agoI think the HP drives found in ML-350 servers and similar will likely be useable for a long time, but you seem to need the whole server, controller card combo. I have one of these servers but the tape drive is unused since some trial software i had expired. Not sure why it still costs thousands of dollars for tape backup software on a 10+ year old server.