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Current LTO drives require to be fed at hundreds of megabytes per second for writing. This is well beyond what 1-gig Ethernet can do. Does you NAS support tha
by j_not_j 3y ago
Current LTO drives require to be fed at hundreds of megabytes per second for writing. This is well beyond what 1-gig Ethernet can do. Does you NAS support that?
(You can occasionally get away with slightly lower feed speed -- the drive will write "invisible empty data" to keep the motors running and tape movement going -- but that cuts into capacity of the media in unpredictable ways. And eventually the drive decides it is facing data starvation and stops writing. The result of that is a few seconds of tape repositioning to restart the writes.)
- louwrentius 3y agoYes my DIY 24-drive NAS does 2.6 GB/s and even multiple LTO drives can’t keep up with that :-) Even my now decommissioned 8-drive NAS could do 800MB/s. And my first 20-drive NAS (long since gone) from 15+ years ago could keep up. (Peak at 1GB/s)
- j_not_j 3y agoISTR that tape drive speed divided into the capacity was pretty constant across multiple LTO generations. About three hours to fill a tape, I think. We used to run "Dell" storage and tape (rebranded ADIC changer and Quantum/IBM drives). A tape changer would autoload tapes under command of the backup software. It would run overnight, automatically changing the tapes two or three times, as required, without issues. Restore was another problem, mostly the fault of the software.
- toast0 3y agoYou would tend to put the tape drive in the NAS, so backup from hosts to NAS over probably slow 1G ethernet, and backup from NAS disk(s) to tape periodically. Not writing from NAS to tape over ethernet, or from hosts direct to tape on the NAS. Used 10G nics are pretty inexpensive these days, if you really want to write network to tape.