SAS tape drives on consumer PC's? Controller cards?

Chris Wilson

Chris Wilson

Chris Wilson

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I want tape to add a LTO4 or LTO 5 tape drive to a home office Windows 7 based PC as I do not want the fragility of storing data on delicate hard drives, or coming to it in a few years and finding the drive won't spin up, or someone has dropped it and knackered it. I consider the fairly simple tape cassette more suited to my storage needs. It's not so much to be as a backup medium, but more as a long term storage medium. Having looked into LTO4 and LTO5 drives my concern is how to connect them to a small home office conventional PC? My motherboard does not have SAS ports, and only pretty old LTO drives seemed to have used SCSI. I assume some have met this need with a controller card of some sort? Can this plug into a normal Windows home PC type modern motherboard and allow a SAS tape drive to run from it? Would it, or a similar type of card, also allow me to run my two software RAID1 mirrored internal back up drives, which are SATA III enterprise drives, off it, in a proper hardware RAID1? Many thanks, people think I am mad looking at tape, but I think they haven't understood that my need is for long term, away from a PC, data STORAGE more than a daily back up regime / medium.
Best regards,
 
You can buy SAS controllers but they aren't cheap, they'll run into the hundreds of pounds. You might also struggle to get one that is supported to run on Windows 7 as opposed to one of the server operating systems.
 
External sas cards card be had quite cheap off the bay, you dont need anything fancy for a tape drive.
Server 08 and win7 drivers are usually interchangeable so doubt that would be the problem (he says :p), getting one that works with your motherboard will be the kicker.
 
as long as one of the 16x ports is free you should be able to stick a 6gb or 12gb host bus adapter sas card in one no problem. 12gb isnt really worth it but ive seen them at a similar price to 6gb.
LTO4 was the last scsi LTO, so you could use scsi but SAS would be better.
Will the drive be external?

where i work we still fix exabyte ffs.
 
For external sas you can look at something like the HP P212/ZM. One internal and one external SAS connectors, seems to be discontinued but there are some around. Using a few with int/ext LTO4/5/6 drives. Keep an eye on cables as there are a few different ends for SAS connectors.

You do not want to mix tape and drives on the same controller, most will tell you this when you read the manuals.
 
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