LTO Tape Experience?


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From a search, it seems that not too many folk are using tape as a backup............

 

I use LTO 5 with it's LTFS ability to back up my (mainly) media library.

 

I'm looking for any IT  professionals out there who may use it in their day job?

 

I'm looking for advice on write speeds and how to optimise them...... and what would be considered good, real life, write speeds....?

 

My reading suggests that the bottleneck with writing to tape drives happens before it actually gets to the drive... In order to minimse that, my workflow is as follows;

 

1.  Rip bluray disk to nvme hard drive on W10 machine.

2. Copy the .iso file over to LTO drive attached to W10 via 6GB HBA card.

3. Only then do I move the .iso file over to the unraid server.

 

I can't think of a more direct/less restricted path, yet I still only get around 80Mb/s...... sometimes less......a long way short of the theoretical max of 140 Mb/s for LTO 5.

 

Any thoughts/hints/tips gratefully received!

 

TIA

 

Paul

 

p.s. Tape is horrifically expensive if one buys new kit, but I buy everything used and it then becomes very cheap indeed over large capacities. I pay about £5/TB for storage as a guide......... After an initial outlay of about £400 for a tape drive and HBA card.

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4 hours ago, caplam said:

You can’t use a tape drive like a hdd.

Why do you say that? That's exactly how it can be used if so desired. 

 

LTFS allows one to use the tape just like any other drive in Windows. A refinement from LTO 5 onwards....

 

And it's fantastic....

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  • 1 month later...
On 10/23/2020 at 9:20 PM, pm1961 said:

Any thoughts/hints/tips gratefully received!

 

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).

 

On 10/24/2020 at 2:38 PM, pm1961 said:

LTFS allows one to use the tape just like any other drive in Windows. A refinement from LTO 5 onwards....

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. 

 

 

Edited by vexx
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18 hours ago, vexx said:

LTFS does allow this, but you gotta remember that tape isn't intended for day-to-day use.

Hey, good to hear I'm not alone! I do use it exactly for the kind of scenario you say..... backing up my bluray collection every few months.......

 

And, as you say, the biggest single benefit in my use case is that I can add the odd few files to an archive. I have a tape dedicated to each letter of the alphabet whereas in my old LTO2, I would have to run the entire tape again just to add a few (albeit large) .iso files.

18 hours ago, vexx said:

Some other ways you could speed it up is a RAMdisk

That's a thought.... I do have 128GB on one of my servers and I believe a RAM disk can use half? It's also connected to the tape pc with a 10Gbe fibre link so that'll be an interesting experiment.

 

ATB

 

Paul

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 12/2/2020 at 2:26 AM, vexx said:

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. 

Well, I'm really happy to say that on my W10 machine, with a direct path of the file sitting on the NVMe drive, through the PCIe bus, direct to the tape drive gets me a constant write of 138 Mb/s. I'm a very happy bunny.

 

What's even more pleasing is that he tape is in a constant "write" state rather than a "stop/wind/start writing again" cycle.

 

Which must be better all round for the mechanics of both tape and drive........

 

 

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On 12/15/2020 at 3:30 PM, pm1961 said:

Well, I'm really happy to say that on my W10 machine, with a direct path of the file sitting on the NVMe drive, through the PCIe bus, direct to the tape drive gets me a constant write of 138 Mb/s. I'm a very happy bunny.

 

What's even more pleasing is that he tape is in a constant "write" state rather than a "stop/wind/start writing again" cycle.

 

Which must be better all round for the mechanics of both tape and drive........

 

 

How do you have passthrough set up (i.e., isolated card, dual or quad port, etc)? And what software did you choose? I am setting up an LTO-5 later this week and I have been reading up on it for a month or so now, there's not a ton of info out there for non-commercial datacenter setups...

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On 2/3/2021 at 12:30 AM, greyday said:

How do you have passthrough set up (i.e., isolated card, dual or quad port, etc)? And what software did you choose? I am setting up an LTO-5 later this week and I have been reading up on it for a month or so now, there's not a ton of info out there for non-commercial datacenter setups...

It's nothing complicated at all.... Everything is on a standard W10 pc.

 

The LTO drive is connected to a RocketRAID 2720 SAS Controller (Other HBA cards are available). A PCIe x8 slot required for this...

 

With LTFS installed on windows, no other software beyond the normal file manager is required.  That's a big plus because the software I used with previous LTO incarnations wasn't cheap. If you're proficient with Linux/Unix software (I'm not!), then I believe handling TAR files (Tape Archives) is native.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape_File_System

 

Your tape appears as a drive and you can drag and drop to your heart's content. You wouldn't want to use it like a HD, but for archiving and backup, it's perfect.

 

Interestingly, LTO6 is a jump in capacity but not so much speed. There's a big jump for LTO7 in both capacity and speed..... but the costs are eyewatering.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open

 

Good luck!

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  • 2 years later...
6 hours ago, ReZo552 said:

I created my first plugin as well. You can install it from here. I will try to get it published to CAs...

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rezo552/unraid-ltfs/main/unraid-ltfs.plg


This probably deserves its own thread.

I'm definitely interested.  I'm still working to move from a Windows infrastructure over to UnRAID... I'm hoping to be able to use my LTO-6 tape library without resorting to hacked copies of BackupExec, as I'd done in the past.  I have a Dell PowerVault 24T.

I don't think my drive has manufacturer support for LTFS.  I tried to get that working under Windows, but wasn't able.
 

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36 minutes ago, bithoarder said:


This probably deserves its own thread.

I'm definitely interested.  I'm still working to move from a Windows infrastructure over to UnRAID... I'm hoping to be able to use my LTO-6 tape library without resorting to hacked copies of BackupExec, as I'd done in the past.  I have a Dell PowerVault 24T.

I don't think my drive has manufacturer support for LTFS.  I tried to get that working under Windows, but wasn't able.
 

 

LTO6 should support LTFS, I would be happy to get feedback. Install the plugin, follow this guide to format and mount the drive via LTFS. Then you can use it like a normal volume (ltfsee_ordered_copy is recommended to avoid constant seeking on the tape)

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 1/30/2024 at 5:20 PM, ReZo552 said:

LTO6 should support LTFS, I would be happy to get feedback. Install the plugin, follow this guide to format and mount the drive via LTFS. Then you can use it like a normal volume (ltfsee_ordered_copy is recommended to avoid constant seeking on the tape)

Would you mind creating a real support plugin page since you plugin support link is pointing to that thread and it is very confusing...

 

You have to create a thread somewhere where you can create a post and a mod will move the thread to the Plugin Support forums.

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20 hours ago, ich777 said:

Would you mind creating a real support plugin page since you plugin support link is pointing to that thread and it is very confusing...

 

You have to create a thread somewhere where you can create a post and a mod will move the thread to the Plugin Support forums.

 

Sure, I was not able to create a thread in the Plugin Support this is why I ended up here. I created a seperate thread here:
ReZo552 - LTFS Plugin - General Support - Unraid

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