[CentOS] Tape drive recommendations

[John R Pierce]

Mark Schoonover wrote:
> Having used a 20 tape library, and suffering through restores with AIT2
> tapes taking 10-12 hours per tape, I gave up on them. 


AIT is a helical scan format based on 8mm video tape,  and is quite 
slow, LTO is a 'serpentine' linear format.

i've had to do very few restores from our LTO-2 system in my lab at 
work.     Let me see how this works, I'll do a trial restore to a 
scratch folder of a few dozen gigabytes.  

fyi, its on a windows 2003 server, and I'm using the HP Data Protector 
Express software that came with the tape drive (a little klunky in the 
GUI, but very functional for me so far), so this won't be directly 
comparable to whatever Linux backup software someone might be using, but 
its indicative of the hardware performance, at least.   I'm writing the 
restore to a 4 x 73GB SCSI raid3 (HP SmartArray something-or-the-other 
thats built into a DL380G4)

ok, its restored 20GB so far in 30 minutes, so 40GB/hour for LTO-2 looks 
good.    thats about 18700 files in 8700 folders, btw.    Yes, a full 
400GB tape might take 10 hours at this rate.   thats quite a lot of 
files.   LTO3 is nearly twice as fast, but then you could start getting 
into disk file system performance limitations