Op 28-sep.-2018 om 23:59 schreef Grant Taylor via cctalk: He told me that he can't use them with his current drives, so all is available.? Not sure about current asking prices, but based on what I paid for the drive at the time and the usual second-hand reductions, would something like EUR 80 for the drive (EUR 10 with internal SCSI flatcable included), EUR 30 per new HP tape, EUR 20 per new non-HP (read: other vendor than HP), EUR 15 per used HP tape, EUR 10 per used non-HP and volume discounts based on the quantities?? The Netherlands.? I assume you're in the US?? You can look up shipping rates on the PostNL website (also available in English), or I can do it for you.? (Especially once I know what you're interested in.)? ?- MG?

I am after LTO-5 as that is what my best drives are (untested of course, and they came from trash.. how bad could it end?) Library after I got the LEDs installed. Need to get a dedicated power supply for them: https://imgur.com/UDqMQq7 I've got it down on one power supply, and it can run on 1 PS with two drives and the logic board. No fibre channel switches or any of that. Backing up the archives of older stuff on less older stuff. -- : Ethan O'Toole

On 09/28/2018 04:14 PM, Andrew Luke Nesbit via cctalk wrote: I know a number of people that use LTO, some of whom use LTO-5. Fair enough. LTO is a type of tape. The 5 vs 4 vs 3, is the generation. So LTO-5 is the fifth generation of LTO tape. Newer generations typically hold more data and / or are faster to access. Benefits of the evolution of the technology. "bang for the buck" is subjective. Are you talking raw capacity? Raw Read / Write speed? Seek time? What? I'm guessing that it's better $ per byte. I'm probably not qualified to answer that. It's my understanding that many manufacturers make LTO drives (of varying generations) with varying types of interfaces. I'm guessing that (some version of) SCSI and / or Fibre Channel are the most common interfaces. With the former being directly attached to a host and the latter being attacked to a SAN that can be accessed by multiple hosts. It's important to know if you're looking at uncompressed / native / raw capacity. Many drives and / or backup applications will (try to) compress data before it's written to tape. It's not uncommon to see some claims of up to 2:1 compression ratios. You might get this with text. I doubt binary data will get it. Your mileage may vary. My experience has been to use some sort of incremental backup strategy. Full backups of the entire data set usually take prohibitively long and can't be done in normal backup windows. (There is an entire sub-industry for optimizations here.) I would recommend you at least learn about the traditional grandfather, father, son backup methodology. An alternate is incremental forever, which does one really big incremental (from zero) and then deltas between each backup run. You probably want to do some reading about how tapes actually store sessions. Specifically, can you continue writing to the tape after you finish a backup? Can the next backup start writing to the same tape after the point that the first backup stopped at? Or do you end up wasting tape. I'd suggest you look into something that can manage backups for you. It is possible to do it yourself, with something like tar, but you will be doing a lot of manual effort. That being said, I have rolled my own backups using tar and the raw SCSI tape device. But I've been told I'm a masochist. ?\_(?)_/? -- Grant. . . . unix || die

No worries, the tapes I am after are LTO-5 / Ultrium-5 -- : Ethan O'Toole