[CentOS] Tape drive recommendations

Wed Mar 28 21:37:03 UTC 2007
John R Pierce <pierce at hogranch.com>

Mailing Lists wrote:
> OK - Thanks for all the great advice!
>
> Based on what I have read, I think I will build a backup server with a 
> big RAID array, back up to the array each night, and then copy the 
> array off to tape during the day.
>
> To keep costs down, I think LTO-1 will work well with the RAID array.  
> I don't mind running over to more than one tape per day.
>
> Can I ask which drives everyone likes?
>
> I found a Tandberg drive for the right price ($740 brand new).  The 
> drive is the Tandberg LTO1 220LTO (Tandberg part number 3120-01).
>
> Does anyone have experience with this drive?
>
> Are there other drives in this price range I should consider?
>
> Who are your favorite vendors for this type of product?


I'm fairly sure most ALL LTO drives are from a very few vendors.    
Quantum bought Certance, fka Seagate Tape, fka Archive, and acquired the 
whole line of LTO from them, prior to that, Quantum was the primary OEM 
manufacturer of DLT drives.

HP may in fact make their own tape transport, as at least some of their 
LTO drives have slightly different performnace specs than everyone elses.

I'm ussing a HP Ultrium LTO2 "1/8 Autoloader", which is a simple 8 tape 
changer.    Love/hate thing, it works great, holds 8 tapes, I can do 
rotating backups (BTW, LTO2 backs up at hard drive speeds), but its kind 
of a pain to remove tapes from the rotation, the backup software I'm 
using supports a concept of a 'mailslot' where the software ejects a 
tape from a library, but this drive only seems to support manual eject, 
so it makes library management kinda difficult.


The HP "1/8 Autoloader" I have is identical to this Quantum unit,
http://www.quantum.com/Products/Autoloaders/SuperLoader3/Index.aspx 
except for the trim details of the faceplate

If I was doing it again, I'd get one of these, 
http://www.quantum.com/Products/TapeLibraries/PX502/Index.aspx (IBM, HP, 
Dell, etc all have their own OEM labeled versions of this same 
library).   This family supports 1 or 2 internal LTO or DLT drives, and 
up to 38 tape slots.