Ask Slashdot: Personal Tape Drive NAS? 268
New submitter hey_popey writes "I would like to piggyback on a previous Ask Slashdot question. Do you know of any realistic way to use a tape drive solution at home, not as a backup, but as a regular NAS? I would like, for example, to save the torrents of my Linux distributions on it, and at the same time, play the family videos on a computer. It would seem at a first glance that the transfer rates and capacity of Linear Tape-Open (1.5TB, 280MB/s in 2010) and the functionality of LTFS would allow me to do that, but I don't know the details, or whether this would be economically viable."
Nope. (Score:5, Informative)
The big disadvantage of tapes is that it has long seek times. Not 'long' as in a few times that of a hard disk, but 'long' as in: can take a full minute to do. Access of multiple files on a normal HD is done by reading a meg of the first file, then seeking to the second file and reading a meg, going back to the first file and reading a meg etc. On a tape drive, even when the seek time is only, say, 10 seconds, you'd get a total throughput of 100K/sec that way. And I'm not even talking about the havoc that using it for storage of torrent files wreaks on it: that's a random-access process if I ever saw one, and the seek times on tape would kill your bandwidth very quickly, and probably your tapes too (because of wear&tear).
Re:Nope. (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not sure you've got the point. Images of Linux distros are big, contiguous files that you want to access rarely and read linearly - probably just the thing to go on tape. To a certain degree, video is the same - one big file that you want to read linearly.
Of course, the practicalities might not be so great. If you want to share the torrent back with the community, then that's a problem. So is wanting to skip around in a video.
But I don't think the question is quite as insane as you make out.
Re:Nope. (Score:5, Insightful)
For playing a movie - maybe. For actually burning a torrent - fair enough... if that is the _only_ thing that happens.
The point is that multiple accesses is going to delay the drive by a huge amount. If you want to, say, copy that Linux iso to your NAS at the same time as someone is playing a movie, the tape drive is going to have to move between the locations of the two files, which is going to wreck the access times, as I stated. Torrents are worse: you're downloading from / uploading to a bunch of other computers, all wanting to read from or write to a different location in the file. Again, this means moving between locations and the resulting huge access times.
You may be able to alleviate the process by putting a SSD or HD as cache in between, but I'm not sure if there's off-the-shelf software to do that, and I'm not even sure if that's going to work comfortably. Besides, if you're going to put a SSD or HD in between, why not just use that?
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I only live with my partner & there's many circumstances where I'm copying to/from my server while she's watching a video & vice versa. Then there's downloading a torrent on the server while both of us are accessing it. Even if it's one person, if you're watching a movie & even refresh the directory listing your movie would stop. This is probably the worst "Ask Slashdot" I've ever seen.
Written by someone with no grasp of technology & approved by someone with even less of a grasp on reality.
Re:Nope. (Score:5, Insightful)
"Written by someone with no grasp of technology"
Your comment written by someone with no grasp of the history of technology. There's folks reading your words who remember reading and storing files from cassette tapes in the 1980s. Like me.
"approved by someone with even less of a grasp on reality"
Story approved by someone with an appreciation that the geekiest novel solutions to problems are things unimaginative people would never consider seriously until forced to, because everyone else is enthusing about how cool it is. Let your mind wander into crazy scenarios and impossible what-ifs. Or butt out. Because some people come to Slashdot for exactly this talk on just this topic of the way-out-there.
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway." - Andrew Tanenbaum, 1996, Computer Network
Re:Nope. (Score:4)
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway." - Andrew Tanenbaum, 1996, Computer Network
You're missing the point that tapes are sequential devices. Forcing random access onto them plunges (a) latency and throughput, and (b) the life of the tape.
This is a completely wrong usage for tapes.
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And it makes the pig unhappy...
Re:Nope. (Score:4, Insightful)
"Written by someone with no grasp of technology"
Your comment written by someone with no grasp of the history of technology. There's folks reading your words who remember reading and storing files from cassette tapes in the 1980s. Like me.
I too used tape drives in the 80s, but my grass is not remotely brown enough and my glasses are not tinted nearly enough to begin to think of those as "the good old days" when thinking about storage solutions. I agree with the GP that this question was asked by someone that doesn't have any clue what the linear nature of a tape means and has never been stuck waiting on a restore of a file that happens to be at the opposite end of the tape than the current position.
I would agree with you about "novel solutions" if the question had instead been about how to use a disk and tape combination similar to RAM/swap and age out files with low access rates to tape while keeping the most used stuff on the faster disk or something else equally "out of the box". In this case it is just someone trying to use an exceptionally wrong tool for the wrong job and there is nothing novel about it (unless we are talking about the stupidity of it).
Also, Andrew was talking about transferring large amounts of data between sites in the days when the Internet was slow, HDDs weren't a good/stable transport method, and cross-site replication was expensive and limited in scope. He was not remotely referring to using tapes to solve an inherently random/multi access problem, so while it is still a funny quote it isn't relevant to the discussion at hand.
Re:Nope. (Score:5, Insightful)
I still use tapes today, and I think they would be nice for home use since I can pick up LTO-3 tapes for about $15 a pop, and LTO-5 tapes for around $42 each.
However, if one thinks a tape can be a random access device, they need to think again. Tapes are great for making sure data is copied somewhere safely, and once the read/write switch is flipped, that the data stays safe.
My recommendation: Keep the tape drive for backups, but go with two mirrored drives, or some other RAID configuration (other than RAID 0) to minimize the impact of a HDD failure.
Re:Nope. (Score:4, Insightful)
I still use tapes today, and I think they would be nice for home use since I can pick up LTO-3 tapes for about $15 a pop, and LTO-5 tapes for around $42 each.
Not really home user price. LTO-3 is 400GB, LTO-5 is 1.5TB. At that sort of capacity, a home user is unlikely to need more than a handful of tapes. With LTO-5, three tapes would be enough for most home users with fairly aggressive backup strategy: two off-site, one being rewritten. If you're only buying three tapes, the cost of the drives becomes very important. The cheapest LTO-5 drives I can find cost over $1,000. At that price, you may as well just buy three 1.5TB hard drives and save the money. Tape is only really cost effective for situations where you have a lot of tapes.
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Very true. I was assuming that the OP already had both the tape drive, as well as the interface card (which even a low-end SAS card will be a few C-notes), not to mention a high speed server because tape drives will get very unhappy if they don't get their full bandwidth when reading/writing (good old "shoe-shining", the bane of all backup admins everywhere.) Of course, one can buy a Tandberg LTO-5 with Thunderbolt for an interface, but that will be a good chunk as well.
Eventually, I plan to spring for a
Re:Nope. (Score:5, Insightful)
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon ..."
And never underestimate the latency either.
Re:Nope. (Score:5, Funny)
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This may be the best comment in the thread :) Too bad I just finished using up all my modpoints last night
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mod parent up ;-)
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Do you know how tape drives work? Jeez, you are one of those who buy things based on what's written on the box right?
Bandwidth: Check
Capacity: Check
Knowing how a tape drive works and whether it is suitable to be used as a random access device or not: TL;DR
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I only live with my partner & there's many circumstances where I'm copying to/from my server while she's watching a video & vice versa. Then there's downloading a torrent on the server while both of us are accessing it. Even if it's one person, if you're watching a movie & even refresh the directory listing your movie would stop. This is probably the worst "Ask Slashdot" I've ever seen.
Written by someone with no grasp of technology & approved by someone with even less of a grasp on reality.
This.
/.?"
When I read the question my first immediate thought was "how did this question ever get posted on
It doesn't matter if a tape drive has a 1000 megabyte per second transfer rate, you can't save one file at the beginning of the tape and play another file to the end at the same time.
Whoever wrote this and whoever approved it apparently doesn't know what a tape is. Hard drives are like CDs, you can be playing the first song and skip to the last song instantly. But tapes are tapes, if you are
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So is wanting to skip around in a video.
I assume you'd copy it to local disk before hitting 'play'...
Re:Nope. (Score:5, Insightful)
for the love of god, buy a regular NAS
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Re:Nope. (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes. Enterprise backup with bucketloads of tapes. For Joe Home User, a couple of 2TB drives in enclosures would be very much cheaper, just as fast/faster, and about as easy to take offsite (which in my experience, never happens with home users).
Re:Nope. (Score:4, Insightful)
l
Of course, the practicalities might not be so great. If you want to share the torrent back with the community, then that's a problem. So is wanting to skip around in a video.
But I don't think the question is quite as insane as you make out.
Forgetting about or not thinking about the impracticalities is the insane part. I can hammer nails with my shoe but asking on a home improvement or shoe site the best way to reinforce my shoes so I can use them to build a tree house is pretty insane.
Re:Nope. (Score:5, Informative)
Yup a lot of people don't remember linear access. and a minute or two? I remember a 15 minute seek and load time when restoring a file from the end of an archive tape.
In fact it's faster to download a new distro on a 7mbps DSL line than it is to find it on the tape.
Now, I have seen with a tape robot cabinet a "infinite" hard drive. 4 hard drives for online storage, they had 4 hard drives for nearline storage, and all the tapes in the cabinet for offline storage. if you accessed the file from online and it was on tape, you would get a winpopup from the server stating that the file is in offline storage and will be spooled up for you. it then would email the person when the file was put back into nearline or online storage storage.
back in 2002 it was how we had 22Tb of tv commercials, Tv show productions, and video footage available for the video editing suites.
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Re:Nope. (Score:4, Informative)
All I remember is that my tape adventure ended with an LTO-3 drive that lasted about a year, doing daily backups, on a 7 tape daily rotation. I had two LTO/DLT generations before that, and a prior helical scan system with smaller tapes as well. The Linux kernel drivers for tape devices never worked all that well -- getting good throughput required tweaking and I had to add a large buffer between gzip and tape in spite of a fast machine. The particular drive in question worked fine on RHEL4 but would not work on a Dell server under RHEL5 where the throughput went to hell -- it was 5-8x slower. If you plan on using any tape drives, make sure that you test the exact combination of server, interface, interconnect, drive, tape, Linux distribution and backup software/scripts you're going to run it as. Anything less may lull you into a false sense of accomplishment that will be blown away in short order once it fails in production.
In times of linux kernel 2.0 I had some junk machines that had ISA-based Adaptec SCSI cards and worked quite well with old 80 megabyte aluminum-plate-backed tape cartridges. It was slow, but it still kept the tape streaming at full speed. It was foolproof, and redirecting tar -z output to /dev/st0 was all that was needed to get it to work, after setting desired block size. Even on a 486-class machine. It seems that it was downhill ever since in terms of ability for the systems to maintain streaming and retain data. I can still read those 80 megabyte tapes with zero errors. All of a dozen of them or so. All of the newer tapes would develop errors under normal use, sometimes after a couple of uses!
Re:Nope. (Score:5, Informative)
and probably your tapes too (because of wear&tear)
the hideous, desperate seeking of a tape in this condition is informally described as 'shoe-shining'...
Re:Nope. (Score:5, Insightful)
1) Fast
2) Cheap
3) Large capacity.
Pick two.
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So your unpowered drive idea is good for small amounts of data and short timeframes (unpowered drives won't always spin up after a few years), but for applications beyond that tapes win on price and reliability.
I've got thousands of reels of tape from the 1980s that were originally a third copy for transport
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Fatal flaw in plan pointed out on first post, well done sir.
begone rational thought (Score:5, Insightful)
you're not thinking this through, are you? it's a tape-drive...
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This ain't one of them.
Re:begone rational thought (Score:5, Funny)
Leave him alone! help me with my RAIF - Redundant Array of Independent Floppies
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"Inefficient floppies?"
I thought it was the array that was supposed to be redundant, not the acronym itself. ;)
You cannot (Score:4, Insightful)
No. Just no.
Re:You cannot (Score:5, Funny)
Forget LTO, I recommend a massive array of Sinclair Microdrives [wikipedia.org]. I mean, if you're going for a silly and impractical tape solution, you might as well push the boat out.
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Re:You cannot (Score:4, Insightful)
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Exactly what I was thinking. Firstly, the tapes will be so slow it'll be quicker to wait for it to be on TV, secondly, the tapes will burn out from the constant seek/read/write.
Just spend the money on a decent case, a dickload of HDD's & a decent mbd/cpu/ram combo, add a tape drive for archiving, but don't even bother using it as a live storage system.
5 minutes of searching would give you the answer "DON'T DO IT".
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Seek Time (Score:3)
The only way I see it working would be to have a HD or SSD acting as a cache between the tape drive and the network.
Re:Seek Time (Score:5, Funny)
I agree that a tape solution would not work well for torrent files, however using it to store movies should work well. If you wish to market it, I can suggest a name for it. You could call it a VCR. But whenever you do, do not call it Betamax, I don't think that would sell very well.
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Yeah you want some kind of hierarchical file system, where files are staged form tape to disk one by one. Can't think of anything that exposes a standard filesystem interface at the moment (nothing that would work for home use, anyway)
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Thinking more about it, the benefit of such a setup is the *massive* storage capacity that is possible with a tape robot. To get any benefit over standard drives, you have to either get a robot, or play one yourself (have the NAS send you an SMS: "please insert tape #10")
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Did you ever play Zork on a PDP-11 running RT11 off of DEC-Tape? Rather interresting to watch the tape reels spin back an forth, but slow as shit sliding down sandpaper!
Youe wanr a corner in a Circular Room? (Score:3)
No. Your question has no rational purpose other than to attempt to create a corner in a circular room
As a NAS a tape drive has three flaws--
Cost.
Reliability
Software.
Tape Drives are designed as peripherals that were either reading or writing the tape media. Read/Write is not an option--- ever heard of Seek Time?
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I have a boxful of tapes of stuff recorded off of HBO, Showtime and Cinimax HD. HD movie storage and recording before Bluray was around.... but you have to rewind after watching.
need cache drive in front (Score:5, Insightful)
you'd need a cache drive in front of it.
the mb/s is ok yes, but that's for linear read/write from the tape.
"While specifications vary somewhat between different drives, a typical LTO-3 drive will have a maximum rewind time of about 80 seconds and an average access time (from beginning of tape) of about 50 seconds.[21][dead link] Note that due to the serpentine writing, rewinding often takes less time than the maximum."
the tape is also only good for 260 full passes.
just buy a hd based nas, archive to tape if you really archive that much stuff. but load it on hd first for gods sake.
Cost and hassle (Score:2)
Harddisk cache (Score:4, Insightful)
Unless you stuff a large harddisk inbetween as cache, I don't see how you can make this perform anywhere near bearable.
Note that frequent write/delete cycles will fragment tape space like you wouldn't believe (perhaps a weekly tape reorganization job would be in order?).
I used to work on z/OS where using tape for normal storage isn't unheard of; typically files not accessed for a while are moved to a tape robot.
When trying accessing one of those files, it did so by writing the file back to harddisk for actual access.
Cost vs HDD Solution (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Cost vs HDD Solution (Score:4, Informative)
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On a per-petabyte basis, over a 12-year period, tape beats HDD by an order of magnitude, on both cost of media and energy:
http://www.lto-technology.com/pdf/LTO%20TCO%20White%20Paper%20Press%20Release.pdf [lto-technology.com]
But, it is hard to imagine an individual having any need to amass that much data.
A rough estimate tells me that the breakeven point is somewhere north of $200k.
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Be cause you can get tape librairies with hundreds of tapes, tapes are cheaper than entreprises disk,
A Disk robot is not practical, think of weight and electrical connectivity
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The last point in particular is why you don't see HDD robots: all that handling would skyrocket the hard drives' failure rate.
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For an HDD "robot", it makes no sense to handle the drives. It's cheap enough to route the SATA signals around a bit with all drives plugged in and have a single PCI-X interface chip per a set of drives. The drives can be (should be!) spun down or even powered off when not in use.
Re:Cost vs HDD Solution (Score:5, Informative)
Also, one of the primary reasons to use tape is you can store them offsite for disaster recovery. You can put a box full of tapes in the back of a panel van and drive them down a bumpy gravel road without any big worries, you just can't do that with HDD's with out protective housing.
re: economies of scale? (Score:3)
Your argument has some merit, but I've consistently found it not to really hold true for the smaller or mid-sized companies I've worked for.
The "high cost of entry but low maintenance cost" of tape just doesn't always pan out, IMO. For starters, you've always got the issue that the tape media isn't readable by anything except a system configured with one of those expensive tape drives designed to work with that generation and type of tape. That means if you're using those tapes for disaster recovery by sto
Wasting your time. (Score:2)
No.
Hard drives are cheaper, easier, more useful.
Punch cards (Score:3, Funny)
Have you considered punch cards? You can get a vintange IBM 370 for only a few hundred thousand and a warehouse to store all the punch cards for just several million. Put it in China and you can have a few servants ravage up with forklifts and storage boxes with the cards and scramble to put them in the reader and upload it back to your home media server.
I mean who cares about using a cheap $200 external usb drive like everyone else pretending we somehow live in the 21st century ... pfft
Sensible idea if you accept the drawbacks. (Score:2)
HP do a LTFS which if I remember correctly treats the tape as a normal drive.
The way to do it would be to treat it as much as an archive as possible. Too many read/writes will wear out the tape in no time at all. If all you are thinking of having is a few tapes which have old torrents of films or things you would occasionally access, there shouldn't be much of an issue beyond the obvious seek times. Be prepared to have your tapes wear out and keep a good supply of cartridges and a second drive.
The obvious b
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PS: A lot of people seem to have the wrong idea about how this guy intends to use it. He's not talking about seeding torrents or installing programs on a fucking tape drive.
I think he means using it as for storing and occasionally reading old torrents or films or whatever, but instead of using a disk drive wants to use a tape drive with a disk drive like FS, so he can burn a linux CD or watch a movie from time to time. It's not a bad idea. It'll cost less than disk drives and still be reasonably durable.
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It'll cost less than disk drives and still be reasonably durable.
That's the problem. Tapes are at best half the price of disks, and the drive is expensive. Next year disks have fallen in price, but the tapes still cost the same, and that just gets worse over time. To maintain a decent tape price it is necessary to switch standard quite often.
Economically viable and/or practical? (Score:2)
One word: Nope.
Forget for a moment, the cost of a LTO tape drive (easily over $1500 for a decent one as it needs to be LTO5) plus a SCSI, SAS or Fibre HBA to drive it, but then even looking at the cost of the tapes, it might be, say, $50 for an 800GB tape (with seek times measured in minutes)
Compare this to a hard drive. less than $100 for 1TB, fast seeks, decent throughput and no fancy controller, or specialised software required.
As nice as something like LTFS sounds, it has some major limitations - you si
Tapes. Are. Useless. (Score:5, Informative)
Hard disks are good. They are also good for backups. They are cheap, they sell them in the shop down the street, they work 99.99% of their intended usage scenarios, do very well in every other usage scenario, and they can be easily connected to any computer, just to see what's in.
Re:Tapes. Are. Useless. (Score:5, Informative)
They refuse to read in 95% of their intended usage scenarios, including, but not limited to, incompatible/failed tape drives, missing/obsolete/buggy/outright stupid software, degraded/stretched/torn off tape, mislabeled/misordered media and so on. And then again, they cost $$$$$, because PHB's keep on buying them. And they do, because they like solid-looking stacks of backups. Even if no one prescribing them in the backup plans had ever tried to restore a single file in the last 20 years. Or ever.
Being an enterprise backup engineer, I have to disagree with the bulk of this. We do thousands of tape restores every year, the tape media is extremely reliable, and modern tape is FAAAST. Nothing can do streaming database backups or restores faster than tape, particularly multithreaded - at that point, most servers and network infrastructures don't have enough throughput to keep up with the tape drives.
Now, Joe Admin at an SMB with hand-labelled tapes (versus barcoded), poorly managed and mismatched tape drives, and poorly planned and tested emergency recovery scenarios is a problem.... but that just means that the person making the technical and purchasing decisions doesn't know how to take advantage of tape properly. If you've got mismatched tape hardware versions, tape drive firmware versions, software problems, etc - well, that's a problem of the person managing the solution. Like any other technical solution, if you're poorly trained on backup solutions, you're going to have a poor implementation. You reap what you sow.
Disk backup has its place, certainly (and my company leverages it heavily as well), but don't write off tape as useless or a poor technical solution. If you need a database backup restored with the smallest RTO, nothing does it faster than tape.
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And then again, they cost $$$$$, because PHB's keep on buying them.
Tapes themselves are incredible cheap, in fact they are the cheapest storage available right now beating both HDDs and DVD-Rs by costing half or a third as much. It's the drive price that is killing it and make them useless for the average consumer. That of course makes HDDs the medium of choice for backup, but it still kind of irks me that we don't have a cheap backup solution right now that keeps drive and media separate (well, DVD-R do that, but are to small to be practical).
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RDX (Score:2)
RDX is much more cost-efficient for small setups and claims the same durability. Sure, the RDX disks are more expensive than tape but the drives are available for $60. And they act like HDD because that is basically what they are.
Consider operation (Score:2)
Seriously though. This is
A long long time ago in an OS far far away... (Score:4, Interesting)
... there used to be a product called "Desktape" made by a company called Optima Software.
Basically it kept a cached (on the system drive) directory listing of all the files on the tape, and then made a (virtual) disk using that directory which was mounted on the desktop (hence the name). The user would perform file transfers with this "disk" in much the same way as he would a real disk, he could copy files to and from it by dragging and dropping, similarly erasing or copying over files. Note that I said file transfers; direct random access to this "disk", while possible, were strongly recommended against because the tape would seek to one block, then seek to the next etc. so, for example, launching an application from the tape was ill-advised. Anyway, when the tape was ejected, the directory would be updated on the tape.
Still it was great because it made backing up very simple (no special utility to run) and this disk would behave just like a real disk so that you could run regular disk utilities on it like "Virtual Disk" (which kept searchable online copies of directory listings of offline volumes).
The software was hardware agnostic which means it could work with a variety of tape drives so maybe it would work with LTO. Alas, the software only ran on pre-OS X Macintoshes and the company is long gone. I would dearly love it if someone could revive this software and make it work with a "modern" OS! Can't someone buy the IP of this company?, surely the development (patents?) is worth something. (I wish there was some sort of law saying that abandoned software like this would, after 5 years, be put in the public domain; of course for this to work the source code would have to be continually archived at, say, the Library of Congress in case of sudden bankruptcy. Not too feasible.)
No. (Score:2)
Unless your application will stream in the file as fast as possible, all the time, this won't work. The tape can only go so slow; when you go below that speed, the tape "shoeshines" which rapidly wears out both the tape and the drive.
Tapes simply were not designed for applications like streaming.
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That would be trivial to solve by just caching the file on a HDD. Does LTFS do that?
More brilliant ways to re-purpose random stuff (Score:3, Funny)
And who needs a stove or oven? Simply wrap your food in your discarded tinfoil hats, and place it on your engine block; by the time you get to the office, breakfast will be ready.
I've also heard you can pound nails with a screwdriver if you adjust your grip...
As a co-worker of mine is fond of saying: "There are no stupid questions. Except for that one..."
Tape-based NAS (Score:2)
Is this a troll? (Score:3)
Come on now, if someone is smart enough to look up the specs for the technology they surely, surely know this is a completely ridiculous suggestion for a home environment.
Yes the mammoth automated tape libraries exist(ed) for huge business over the last 50 years, however a home version which doesn't require user interaction for tape changes is madness, plus, depending on the OS - the system may well want to check / index / scan the files frequently. Is this person proposing using multiple drives? Seriously what's the deal here?
I guess if it's a troll, bravo - it's stupid yet they clearly let it on the site and I as well as others are biting.
If it's not a troll and you're legitimately asking,.... I really don't know what to say,... do you actually want a thought out response to such a ridiculous fucking question?
Editors: you're better than this, I thought anyhow,...
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My guess is its a young 22 year old IT guy who thinks it is cool but has not used a VCR since he was 5 and never seen a tape drive before unlike us older folks. When you read specs like 110 megs a second it gives a false impression it is just as fast.
There are kids today who do not remember the pains of fast forwarding a song on tape for 9 fucking minutes to hear that one good song while the rest of the album is crap. That was so awesome about cds. It was not the sound quality but the fact I could skip trac
helloooo??????? (Score:2)
As everyone else, that using a collection of tapes with a single or small number of tape drives is impractical.
Instead, I recommend reading up on hierarchical storage:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchical_storage_management/ [wikipedia.org]
Also, if you really want a solution which does what you ask for, SamFS may be for you:
http://www.c0t0d0s0.org/archives/4240-Less-known-Solaris-features-SamFS.html/ [c0t0d0s0.org]
Bye,
os10000
Offline storage (Score:2)
This might work if you have a tape changer as secondary storage and disk as your primary storage, and spool out little-used data to tape and restore on demand. I _think_ this is what the Removable Storage service was for in Windows 2000/2003, but I think it required additional software and may no longer be part of the OS. The idea is that if a file isn't accessed in a long time, it's replaced with a "stub" and moved to tape. If you access it, the file is pulled back from tape to disk. Of course, the tap
Why would you want to? (Score:2)
A quick google reveals that a 1.5TB LTO tape costs $40. I saw brand new 3TB seagate hard drives at MicroCenter the other day for $99.99. So, you want to store 3TB.
You can either do it with tape, and all the problems that implies, and a rather expensive tape drive, or you can use cheap disks for $7.75 more per TB. I'd go with the disks any day of the week.
Like an Airplane on a Treadmill... (Score:2)
Furthermore, the submitter said his intent was to download torrents ON TO the tape. Torrents are NOT sequential downloads - that is, if the beginning of the file is Packet A and
While it's a dumb idea, it's been done (Score:4, Insightful)
Back in the before time, I knew a guy who ran a BBS who came about a DAT drive by some method or another. I assume he stole it from work. Anywho, that was a lot of storage back then and he wanted to use it to store files for the BBS. What he came up with was a caching system where people tagged the files they wanted, the files would be copied from tape to temp storage on the hard drive, would be downloaded by the user, then deleted from the hard drive. I had a similar system for the CD-ROM changer on my multi-line BBS. If someone on line 3 wanted file from Disc_2 and someone on line 1 wanted a file from Disc_7, the poor thing would just thrash back and forth between discs until I added the caching system.
But it's just totally impractical today. I've got a 26tb array for my bulk storage. Even with hard drive prices still a bit inflated, it could be built for $2500 with nice drive cages. $3200 for 39tb using 3tb drives.
An LTO 5 library is going to run you $5000 for just the drive/library. You weren't going to stand there swapping tapes by hand, were you? Another $550ish to fill it with tapes. And that's only 1.5tb gigs per cartridge. (Native capacity is what you should be using for this type of data.) 16*1.5=24tb online for around $5500. Nevermind the cost of the caching system that would be needed just to make it work in even the most crude manner with a minimum of 5 minutes between initial request and the file being available for use. More than double if it spans tapes.
So roughly double the cost for a similar amount of storage with horrendous access times. Sounds like a plan. You should totally do it and report back.
my own wee lad's fantasy (Score:2)
when I was ten year old I would see ads for syquest drives in magazines, and dreamt of 44MB or 80MB cartridges when I had a 40MB hard disk drive (indiana jones atlantis was taking 10MB from it). same thing when we had a 486 DX/2 66 with a 120MB drive and we had to choose between doom and descent. I didn't realize at the time that a crappy backup drive wasn't meant for even DOS gaming. in retrospect it sucks that we didn't get an old hard drive too (even an old by then 80MB drive) and especially it's a shame
Plan 9 (Score:2)
Look into Plan 9 [wikipedia.org]. While it never really got off the ground commercially, it's the successor to Unix. All resources are distributed over the network & storage servers know how to manage multiple levels of storage, being able to move data from 'fast' to 'slow' as it ages.
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"The only advantage of tape is cost/GB, "
no. it's primary advantage is 80X longevity than a hard drive and produce. at least good ones do, nothing with the label "iomega" has this feature.
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LTO tapes have a durability of about 300 whole passes. Hard disks and SSD's have several orders of magnitude better durability. Note that the poster is trying to use it as active storage, not as archive material.
And frankly, even for archive material I'd trust an offline stored disk for as long as I would a tape (a 30 year stored tape reader would suffer from the same mechanical issues that a disk might after such storage). Either way, you're better off using online maintained redundant storage than hoping
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Who cares about the driver?
I often find myself in situations that I'd pay 10x the price of a tape driver to read a dead hd ..which has it's plates scratched or demagnetized.
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While the tapes themselves have a 30+ year shelf life expectancy with minimal data loss, the tape drives do not.
Five years ago, I tried backing up everything at home on a DAT72 tape drive. I have now on 24 tapes redundant backups of everything that will be even readable after i'm dead, but it's useless. After three years, one of the spindle motors of the tape drive burned out. It's not replaceable or fixable. A replacement tape drive on e-Bay (cheaper that the original price) to read back those 24 tapes of
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There are online services that for a reasonable fee will accept your tapes and put them into online storage(or a HD) for you.
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80 times the longevity? No. Really no.
Maybe 10 times, and only if the tape is sitting in a air conditioned room, not being used.
Taking a DLT and doing random access stuff will destroy the tape in a matter of weeks.
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The modern drives will deal with a stretched tape I'm sure without much issue. In a linear-scan tape, reading a fraction (say 1/8th or 1/16th) of the tape's capacity will go end-to-end anyway, as data is recorded on a set of tracks and when you hit end of the tape, the head indexes to a new set of tracks, the tape reverses, and keeps on going.