vexx

I love LTO, use it regularly. Write speeds can get up to about 120~140 with LTO5, but typically in bursts. More often than not, I see backups done straight from HDD or RAIDs to tape, and getting about 50~80MB/s is perfectly acceptable for most users, sometimes less where iSCSIs and other network methods are used for transfer. Some other ways you could speed it up is a RAMdisk (if you're lucky enough to have a nice big server with a few hundred G or TB of RAM). I've never used it personally, but NVRAM should defiantly keep your tape write speeds consistently up in the 100+MB/s in ideal conditions. Good tape stock and a pristine drive will see that get up to 120MB/s though that's not a number I've seen often (outside of bursts). LTFS does allow this, but you gotta remember that tape isn't intended for day-to-day use. Technically, it's only capably of about 200 tape-length passes. You'll probably get way more than that, but you're running out of spec and risking data. LTFS was brought about to allow for better iterative backups and restores. LTO is really there as a very robust backup method. Tape can last for decades. We still have old LTO2 stock from early 00s around. It's best used as a cold storage long-term backup strategy. Perfect for backing up your unRAID NAS every few months -- something I'm about to start figuring out myself, as I'm new to unRAID. Been a long time since I looked into tape-backup options that run straight from Linux without Windows to host something like Veeam or Veritas.