4 ms·
The other problem is that to prevent "shoe shining", you need a fast storage system to feed the tape drive. The somewhat slow LTO-4 HP 1760 I use has a sustain
by hga 13y ago
The other problem is that to prevent "shoe shining", you need a fast storage system to feed the tape drive. The somewhat slow LTO-4 HP 1760 I use has a sustained compressed (on the tape drive) speed of 160 MB/s, their a few hundred dollars more LTO-5 tape drive require 280 MB/s ... and apparently have two SAS ports. I can get by just fine with one Seagate 15K drive on another PCI-e card buffering the former, I think you'd need something more intense for LTO-5, I've read that no single hard drive can keep up with LTO-5 drives.
- dragontamer 13y agoFor people who are used to ~20MB/s (maximum) off of x4 speed 50GB BluRay drives, I think the problem you note is a "first world problem"... a problem many people would be happy to have. On no! My Tape Drives are written too fast that they're causing me issues :-). If only my hard drives were fast enough to keep the write buffer full!
- hga 13y agoI suppose so in some ways, but shoe shining will prematurely wear out your LTO tapes and drives. The L in LTO is for linear: when the tape writes its traveling at over 100 inches per second. Compare to helical scan tape systems like VHS and DAT/DDS where the tape heads are moving very quickly past the tape but the tape itself is not really fast at all. So if the write buffer empties, the drive has to decelerate the tape, wind it back quickly, then accelerate it so it's at full speed when it's at the location to write a new block. I might recommend DDS for the 3rd World ^_^. It's what I used until it fell too far behind hard disk sizes.