Tape storage drives

Chris Wilson

Chris Wilson

Chris Wilson

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Joined
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Having wasted a lot of time, and some money on flaky SATA hard drives failing or starting to fail, and wanting to be able to store a few terrabytes of data for many years I am coming to the conclusion having a box of ten year old hard drives in the attic or elsewhere, wondering if they'll boot up or not, has made me look at alternatives. BluRay hasn't got enough storage per disc even at 50Gb per disc, and there seems no real data as to how long this medium lasts under average storage conditions. Tape seems the answer, but it comes at a price. I am thinking LTO5 drives, what sort of money do I need to be looking at for a new known brand drive, and has anyone experience of them in a home office environment? I use a software RAID1 on my main PC, but I have several gigabytes of photos and need to get onto a reliable long term storage medium.

I will then not need to run the tape often, I am happy in the knowledge I have a couple of copies of stuff not inside a mechanical device that's likely to go AWOL if dropped or subject to knocks, or just plain decides not to spool up.

Thanks.
 
How much data exactly would you be looking to backup (e.g. how much, number of machines etc..)?

I use an LTO 6 drive for my backing up my network, I'm normally backing up around between 2-3TB on a weekly basis, for me it's worth it as losing that data will cost me a shed load more than the outlay

Initial outlay is really not that cheap at a minimum you're going to need:

  • SAS controller - I bought a cheap HP SmartArray 212 from an auction site
  • LTO Drive (I've got an HP internal model, would probably look at the Tandberg version as they're considerably cheaper)
  • LTO Tapes - depending on usage I'd also look to get a cleaning tape
  • Some decent backup software - I currently use Backup Exec (no specific reason for this I just use it at work, know the product well & it works well with my workstation imaging software)

For a backup you really need somewhere offsite to store the tapes should the worst happen (my tapes live at my sisters house)

Personally if I were doing it again I would look at buying the hardware second hand
 
Hi, thanks for the replies. I want tape 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 use SCSI. I assume you have met this need with your controller card? Can this plug into a normal Windows home PC 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, way from a PC, data STORAGE more than a daily back up regime / medium.
 
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I see new LTO5 drives (Tandberg) for about £600 and used LTO4 ones for about £300, sans tapes for the used ones, but with one new tape for the Tandberg, I do not know what to expect to pay card wise. If a card would also do hardware RAID1 as well as run a tape drive it would address my other concern. Thanks.
 
You call had drives 'delicate' but you're quite happy with tape. :eek:

Having experienced situations, even in a well-managed and well-funded corporate environment where failed LTO tapes/equipment have lost server backups there is no way on this earth I'd trust them for long-term storage.
 
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