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I recently purchased a LTO-5 drive for my Gentoo-based NAS and have a few key takeaways for those who are interested. Don't buy a HP tape drive if you want to u
by connorgutman 5y ago
I recently purchased a LTO-5 drive for my Gentoo-based NAS and have a few key takeaways for those who are interested. Don't buy a HP tape drive if you want to use LTFS on Linux! HPE Library & Tape Tools is prety much dead on modern Linux. Official support is only for RHE 7.x and a few versions of Suse. Building from source is a dependency nightmare that will leave you pulling hair. IBM drives have much better Linux support thanks to https://github.com/LinearTapeFileSystem/ltfs https://github.com/LinearTapeFileSystem/ltfs. That being said, IMO, you should consider ditching LTFS for good ol' TAR! It's been battle tested since 1979 and can be installed on basically anything. TAR is easy to use, well documented, and makes way more sense for linear filesystems. While drag&drop is nice and all, it really does not make sense for linear storage.
- smackeyacky 5y agoUpvote for tar! LTFS seems like an overly complex solution to a relatively simple problem that tar already solved. Treating tapes like disks and trying to run a file system on them ignores the way they work.
- bsdice 5y agoCan tar control block size and maximum file size? If you can't set those to 1 MB and 20 GB respectively, then for LTO-5 and later you will be leaving alot of performance on the table. Like half or more, check file size graph in https://www.bareos.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/optimizing-the-tape-speed.pdf https://www.bareos.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/optimizing....
- jwiz 5y agoidk man, tar is pretty new, they probably haven't had time to do that yet.