[plug] Tapes

[Brad Campbell]

On 8/3/23 21:22, Brad Campbell wrote:
> On 8/3/23 21:16, Yuchen Pei wrote:
>> On Wed 2023-03-08 16:22:31 +0800, Brad Campbell wrote:
>>
>>> G'day all,
>>>
>>> I've gone and bought an LTO-5 tape drive with the intention of
>>> supplementing our already pretty comprehensive backup routine.
>>
>> Sorry but a tangential question: what is the best way to get an LTO-5+
>> tape drive in Australia?
> 
> I took a punt on E-bay. Expensive punt at nearly $400 plus $32 for a new tape to test with, so we'll see how it works out.
> 

Turned out to be a good punt. The drive has had very little use and passes all diagnostic tests. It has done the equivalent of 268 tapes over 616 load cycles. Everything reports as "99% life remaining".

I've started using a combination of tar and pbzip2 for archiving, but I'm going to have to put a cheap 2TB SSD into the box with the tape drive to stage to, as I can't feed it fast enough (seeing ~130MB/s write speeds).
As it's an internal drive, my biggest issue has been cooling. Lot of blocking case holes with gaffa tape and re-arranging fans to get the airflow required to keep it cool during a write.
While this is working adequately, I've ordered a proper external enclosure with the right cooling.

We'll see how it works out over the next couple of months.

Regards,
Brad
-- 
An expert is a person who has found out by his own painful
experience all the mistakes that one can make in a very
narrow field. - Niels Bohr