LTO build for Video Archiving - Suggestions/Help? (Wasn't sure where to post)

[FireGeko]

I'm wanting to get an LTO drive to allow me to offload large amounts of Video file at a time for archival purposes and free up some space on my HDDs which.

I seem to be coming across conflicting information in my research and wondered if anyone had any experience or insight into how the SAS protocol works and how it could be used for my purposes.

 

Ideally I would like to get an LTO5 Drive and internally mount it to a Case with a 5.25" bay (I have an old Antec case which should do fine for this). The drive seems to have an SFF 8484 connector (which I believe is a backplane connector for when the drive is installed in a server/autoloader). I am struggling to find a suitable HBA to connect it to, I had found an LSI 6Gbps SAS HBA 9200-8i that looks to have a pair of SFF 8087 connectors and thought that an adapter from 8484 - 8087 would allow the drive to be detected and functional, but the sellers I have asked seem not to be sure. One also mentioned that they doubted that the HBA would be detected by the PC's Bios...but gave no reason as to why...is there something I'm missing here?

 

I know that using (particularly older) LTO drives isn't exactly easy in Windows, but I do have access to an older Mac Pro if that makes more sense or of course am happy to run Linux on the final build of the LTO backup PC. Likewise I have found out that there needs to be sufficient air flow to keep the LTO Drive iself and possibly the HBA cool enough to operate.

 

Any help would be amazing!

Thanks

[Bombastinator]

I think what you are describing is referred to as a “NAS”.  It has the function of one and the form factor of one.  I Might be missing something here.

[FireGeko]

1 minute ago, Bombastinator said:

I think what you are describing is referred to as a “NAS”.  It has the function of one and the form factor of one.  I Might be missing something here.

Hi there, thanks for your reply.

 

I'm not really looking to build a NAS, as I have no requirement for it to be attached to the network. I did think about a NAS as an alternative, but ultimately  it still requires a lot of investment in HDDs, which are not as reliable of LTO tapes for archiving.

 

Thanks

[IntMD]

One of the mods, @leadeater knows a lot about server type stuff from all accounts, but not sure what their experience is with tape drives and random cobbling together of stuff, but maybe they can help.

[Electronics Wizardy]

11 minutes ago, FireGeko said:

Hi there, thanks for your reply.

 

I'm not really looking to build a NAS, as I have no requirement for it to be attached to the network. I did think about a NAS as an alternative, but ultimately  it still requires a lot of investment in HDDs, which are not as reliable of LTO tapes for archiving.

 

Thanks

How many tb are you looking to archive? 

 

Normally hdds are cheaper till you get around the 50-100tb mark, and there are a lot more annoyances working with tape than hdds.

[Bombastinator]

13 minutes ago, FireGeko said:

Hi there, thanks for your reply.

 

I'm not really looking to build a NAS, as I have no requirement for it to be attached to the network. I did think about a NAS as an alternative, but ultimately  it still requires a lot of investment in HDDs, which are not as reliable of LTO tapes for archiving.

 

Thanks

So the difference between this and a nas is you only want to attach one device and are using a different network.  One just between the machine and the drive case.  Storage type seems a bit irrelevant for this bit.  This is sounding more like just an external case storage drive.  I’m not sure you’d need anything particularly special.  The only question would be matching the data delivery speed of the port with the write speed of the LTO.  I suspect this is taken care of with standard LTO external enclosures and software.

[FireGeko]

17 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

How many tb are you looking to archive? 

 

Normally hdds are cheaper till you get around the 50-100tb mark, and there are a lot more annoyances working with tape than hdds.

The LTO5 Tapes are 1.5TB a peice, but can be bought for £14 ($17/$18). Each tape can store more than one of my Camera's recording format of 1tb, so it's perfectly suited. The older LTO5 drives are can be purchased quite cheap themselves £140 - £250 ($170 - $309) so yes there is an upfront cost, but considering my internal HDDs of my main edit rig are maxed, the additional storage in archival format makes more sense than adding HDDs to my edit rig or using a UBS - Sata dock and shelving the HDDs.

 

It's a complicated soluition and not a use case many would have i suspect...:P

[Electronics Wizardy]

3 minutes ago, FireGeko said:

The LTO5 Tapes are 1.5TB a peice, but can be bought for £14 ($17/$18). Each tape can store more than one of my Camera's recording format of 1tb, so it's perfectly suited. The older LTO5 drives are can be purchased quite cheap themselves £140 - £250 ($170 - $309) so yes there is an upfront cost, but considering my internal HDDs of my main edit rig are maxed, the additional storage in archival format makes more sense than adding HDDs to my edit rig or using a UBS - Sata dock and shelving the HDDs.

 

It's a complicated soluition and not a use case many would have i suspect...:P

Do you have a back plan for this data? Is this just a archive of data stored on anouther location? Don't just store the data on tapes.

 

Seeing how 8tb hdds are commonly found for about 120-140usd, the savings aren't that great there.

 

 

[Catsrules]

1 hour ago, FireGeko said:

I'm wanting to get an LTO drive to allow me to offload large amounts of Video file at a time for archival purposes and free up some space on my HDDs which.

I seem to be coming across conflicting information in my research and wondered if anyone had any experience or insight into how the SAS protocol works and how it could be used for my purposes.

 

Ideally I would like to get an LTO5 Drive and internally mount it to a Case with a 5.25" bay

Try asking around on Reddit /r/homelab or /r/DataHoarder I believe there are a few users that have tape drive experience.

[FireGeko]

1 hour ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Do you have a back plan for this data? Is this just a archive of data stored on anouther location? Don't just store the data on tapes.

 

Seeing how 8tb hdds are commonly found for about 120-140usd, the savings aren't that great there.

 

 

The plan is to move active footage to my archive HDDs and current archived Data to the Tape.

 

Camera > Camera SSD (samsung T5) > Edit project from T5 > Backup to Archive HDD > Backup to LTO tape

 

I'd rather not have a bunch of HDDs knocking around for archive is all, so I'm not too concered about the saving difference.

We all know the data storage principles of 3 copies, 3 locations, 3 mediums etc, so adding tape to my current set up adds the long term element. 

Is there a specific reason you mentioned not keeping the data just on tape?

[FireGeko]

29 minutes ago, Catsrules said:

Try asking around on Reddit /r/homelab or /r/DataHoarder I believe there are a few users that have tape drive experience.

Thanks for those, I will head over there and have a look  

[FireGeko]

*Update on this topic*

 

All seems good with my original idea.

 

You will need an appropriate HBA card and cable to interface with the LTO tape drive. In most cases this will be over a SAS interface. Older drives may use an SCSI connection and newer drives use Thunderbolt. There's two types of HBA to look out for, xi and xe for example: LSI 9205-8e or LSI 9205-8i. These dictate where the connection ports are on the card, External or Internal. This itself is either dictated by the LTO drive you purchased or will determine it. (One to install in a case, as I wish to do or one that is in an external enclosure). 

 

My issue with adapting from one SAS connection to another seems not to be a problem, so going from 8482 - 8087 would be fine, given the restrictions of the cable lenght.

 

There doesn't seem to be an issue regarding Bios detection, although I can't say the same for driver support etc, it could auto install for all I know at this point.

LTO5 and up supports LTFS (Linear Tape File System) and seems to be more accessible to Windows that I had first thought - this is not to say it wouldn't be easier on Linux or OSX.

 

So basically, I'm going to plow ahead with this and see what I end up with. If anyone else out there is thinking about doing this as well (not that there will be many, haa), I will update the post when I've moved on to the next stages.

 

This is also the thread on the DataHorders SubReddit (Thank you Catsrules for the advice on that): https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/fuf2fz/new_to_lto_how_to_build_lto5_archiving_pc/

 

 

Also, this video from LTT explains what LTO is for anyone who's not sure what I was on about to begin with: