On 18 June 2012 08:38, Ken Teh <t...@anl.gov> wrote: > Hi all, > > I need some help and advice with LTO tape drives. I haven't kept up with > tape technology for several years now and from a quick google, it appears > that the only games in town are LTO and DDS. We do have a single DDS > deployment and we are looking at replacing it with LTO because of capacity > limitations. > > Some questions: > > (1) It appears that LTO-5 is the current technology. But most single drives > use SAS as an interface. Again, I am not familiar with SAS. All I know is > what the acronym stands for. Is it a simple matter of buying a SAS card? > Will it run out of the box on a SL6.x box? Any issues with drivers?
There are always issues with drivers and specific cards. I believe that LSI and Adaptec will sell cards that will work with SciLin. > (2) I see that LTO-4 is still available. And a quick google suggests that > Ultra160 or 320 LVD SCSI is the more common interface for these drives. I > have several of the Adaptec 29xxx cards, made available when we transitioned > to SATA. Is this viable or would you recommend against using LTO-4? It > appears to be about 5 years old. I think it would be preferable to use > technology that has at least some life to it but I am not inclined to work > very hard to make LTO-5 work if it is not well supported on Linux. An LTO-5 drive is backwards compatible with LTO-4,3 (and maybe 2,1) drives. It is one advantage of the LTO format that they do a lot of backwards compatibility. The drives should look about the same to the hardware. We have LTO-5 library from Quantum which bacula uses without any special software. > We are not looking to do anything fancy. A single internal drive and a box > of tapes. Backups the old fashioned way. > > Specific recommendations welcomed. As in, buy this card, buy this drive! > > Thanks! -- Stephen J Smoogen. "The core skill of innovators is error recovery, not failure avoidance." Randy Nelson, President of Pixar University. "Years ago my mother used to say to me,... Elwood, you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant. Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant. You may quote me." —James Stewart as Elwood P. Dowd