Linear Tape-Open 6th Generation

[chenci]

Hi everyone. Recently I've come across with an old storage technology from the late 90'. It's call LTO which uses magnetic tape as data storage. This technology is still used heavily by enterprises and corporations for backup purposes. The tape is cheap (LTO-6 generation tape have 2.5TB of uncompressed storage and cost 50USD) but the tape drive is very pricey (we are talking about 2000 to 3000 USD new ones and less than 1000 USD used ones). You may ask why use tape, that is so old school. Well it seems that our HDD or SSD are supposed to fail in less than 5 years (i have a lot of failed HDD mechanical drives at home). If we are lucky our HDD or SSD can make it to less than 10 years. LTO-6 tape are design to withstand 30 years. That's 30 freaking years of backup without degradation. I think the reason why it's not common use with mass consumer it's because of the drive price. It's write speed is not that bad (160mb/s write) considering your are making a permanent backup. Of course the tapes are RW.

My question is this: does anyone have any experience using LTO6 tapes (with any brand of drives: dell, hp, ibm, etc)? What are the main disadvantages? And of course, can Linus make a video about LTO6?

[leadeater]

Pretty sure there has been a video already about tapes.

LTO-6 is not that old btw, 2012, and LTO-7 is out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open. LTO is also not the first/oldest tape technology that has been used.

We used to write out 150 LTO-5 tapes until mid way through last year but switched to 6 monthly and increased our disk backup pool for long retention. The price you have mentioned is more than what you should be paying, find better prices.

The big downside to tapes is the seek times, very slow. This is why tapes are used for backups since you only ever want to stream write to them and then put them away long term. Tapes are also used for archive storage for very old files that need to be online and accessible but have not been access for a long period of time. 

[chenci]

Thanks for the reply. What brand of the drive are you using for LTO6? Is it common for the tape to get stuck like old VCR?

[leadeater]

3 minutes ago, chenci said:

Thanks for the reply. What brand of the drive are you using for LTO6? Is it common for the tape to get stuck like old VCR?

We use Quantum and HP, but the actual tape drives in the Quantum are HP.

Tapes very rarely get stuck in the drive. What is more common if you are using a tape library is that the robotic arm that picks up the tape from the magazine to put in the tape drive gets misaligned so either doesn't pickup the tape correctly or can't put in the drive. General maintenance helps prevent this and running more than one library depending on backup importance etc.