7 ms·

Hehe. If you're trying to live with just a laptop and an LTO drive, I can certainly see it! I'd expect most people who get into LTO drives have a massive set of

by creer 2y ago

Hehe. If you're trying to live with just a laptop and an LTO drive, I can certainly see it! I'd expect most people who get into LTO drives have a massive set of hard drives, some convoluted desktop-and-up case(s) to run them, a couple laptops and random peripherals such as cameras, scanners and whatnot. USB all over the place. - So that for them both the drive and the command line interface are deeper in a technology map. But that goes back to the minimal market for LTO among amateurs. They will scratch their itch and write software for it but it's not exactly critical mass.

tombert 2y ago
I used to have a rack mounted server that I used for Jellyfin and as a NAS so it was easy to install a SAS card, but it was sucking up way too much power and costing me about $50/month to run, so I got rid of it, and replaced it with one of those tiny gaming PCs you can get on Amazon. I've gotten it to work over thunderbolt with an eGPU case on both the mini computer and my laptop, so it can be done, at least with NixOS. I still have the tapes, and I use them to archive really important stuff, but honestly what I mostly do now is have a pretty resilient ZFS RAID, which is 24 16TB drives, three RAID-Z2's chained together, so I can lose up to six drives (two from each RAID) before I risk losing data. I run a scrub once a month, so if a drive dies, hopefully I can catch it before I lose anything.
rbanffy 2y ago
To keep those drives happy and minimize wear, you need to push data at a constant rate so the tape can move continuously while writing. You'll need to push a sustained stream of up to 400 MBps (for LTO-9) to the drive (and, therefore, read that from the sources). A common pattern is to send files for archival to a disk volume and dump from there to tape. To fill an LTO-9 tape, expect to set up from 20 to 50TB of fast storage. I would assume a RAID-0 of large-ish HDDs with an SSD cache in front can handle it. I'd prefer a data-center grade SSD with the full size of the batch you want to record. Nothing forces you to fill the tape though. If your datasets are in the 100GB range, Blu-ray archival might be a better option. The disks are supposed to last 100 years if well stored and the drivers are much, much, much cheaper.
- Tepix 2y ago
  400 MB/s, not Mbps. That‘s getting near S-ATA III (SATA-600) limits. Also a LTO-9 tape can store up to 45TB of uncompressed data (18 TB uncompressed), so you better have a fast storage volume ready with your data when you’re writing your next tape.
  - rbanffy 2y ago
    The one thing worth remembering though is that you are not forced to write all of the 18TB of data, so your staging drive can be significantly smaller, but considering the tape alone costs about half of what a large hard disk costs (at least at my local office supplies provider), unless you are using more than 50% of the capacity, you'll be better off by writing it to a HDD (at least for backup purposes). Long-term archival, however, is a different thing and tape is a much better medium for that. It's a shame DOTS [1] doesn't seem to be going anywhere... 1- https://group47.com/what-is-dots/ https://group47.com/what-is-dots/
    - Tepix 2y ago
      I'm seeing LTO-9 tapes (with 18TB of uncompressed capacity) starting at 85€ whereas 18TB HDDs start at 309€, so here the price difference is at a factor of 3.6x

by creer 2y ago

tombert 2y ago

I used to have a rack mounted server that I used for Jellyfin and as a NAS so it was easy to install a SAS card, but it was sucking up way too much power and costing me about $50/month to run, so I got rid of it, and replaced it with one of those tiny gaming PCs you can get on Amazon. I've gotten it to work over thunderbolt with an eGPU case on both the mini computer and my laptop, so it can be done, at least with NixOS. I still have the tapes, and I use them to archive really important stuff, but honestly what I mostly do now is have a pretty resilient ZFS RAID, which is 24 16TB drives, three RAID-Z2's chained together, so I can lose up to six drives (two from each RAID) before I risk losing data. I run a scrub once a month, so if a drive dies, hopefully I can catch it before I lose anything.

rbanffy 2y ago

To keep those drives happy and minimize wear, you need to push data at a constant rate so the tape can move continuously while writing. You'll need to push a sustained stream of up to 400 MBps (for LTO-9) to the drive (and, therefore, read that from the sources). A common pattern is to send files for archival to a disk volume and dump from there to tape. To fill an LTO-9 tape, expect to set up from 20 to 50TB of fast storage. I would assume a RAID-0 of large-ish HDDs with an SSD cache in front can handle it. I'd prefer a data-center grade SSD with the full size of the batch you want to record. Nothing forces you to fill the tape though. If your datasets are in the 100GB range, Blu-ray archival might be a better option. The disks are supposed to last 100 years if well stored and the drivers are much, much, much cheaper.

Tepix 2y ago
400 MB/s, not Mbps. That‘s getting near S-ATA III (SATA-600) limits. Also a LTO-9 tape can store up to 45TB of uncompressed data (18 TB uncompressed), so you better have a fast storage volume ready with your data when you’re writing your next tape.
- rbanffy 2y ago
  The one thing worth remembering though is that you are not forced to write all of the 18TB of data, so your staging drive can be significantly smaller, but considering the tape alone costs about half of what a large hard disk costs (at least at my local office supplies provider), unless you are using more than 50% of the capacity, you'll be better off by writing it to a HDD (at least for backup purposes). Long-term archival, however, is a different thing and tape is a much better medium for that. It's a shame DOTS [1] doesn't seem to be going anywhere... 1- https://group47.com/what-is-dots/ https://group47.com/what-is-dots/
  - Tepix 2y ago
    I'm seeing LTO-9 tapes (with 18TB of uncompressed capacity) starting at 85€ whereas 18TB HDDs start at 309€, so here the price difference is at a factor of 3.6x