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Questions tagged [tapedrive]

A tape drive is a device that reads and writes data on a magnetic tape, often for archival or backup purposes.

81 questions
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How do you monitor the performance of a character device (e.g. tape drive)?

There are many ways to monitor block device performance: dstat and iostat, heck, even sar will give you data on block device I/O rates. Unfortunately, I don't know of any good spur-of-the-moment tools for monitoring the performance of a character…
Slartibartfast
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How Serviceable are Tape Drives?

I'm contemplating an auto-loading tape drive as part of a backup strategy. This would be my first experience with tape backup. The cost-effectiveness of tape drives seems to depend on the assumption that they will provide many years of service. …
alx9r
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Difference between LTO half-height and full-height drives?

I've noticed that most tape drive vendors provide two options: full-height or half-height. The half-height drives are physically smaller and less expensive, yet seem to have identical specifications compared to their full-height peers. What is the…
Nic
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What does it mean, if all LEDs of an LTO-6 drive are flashing?

All LEDs of an half height LTO-6 drive are flashing with ~ 4 Hz. An LTO-5 tape is still inside, the drive does not react on commands, the flashing continues after a power cycle. I could not find the error code in the Tandberg manual. The drive is…
Jonas Stein
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Tape Storage - How do I setup a tape backup system for use with my NAS

I currently have a QNAP NAS with a raid 5 config (~600gb storage) but don't have a reliable backup solution. I've heard great things about tape backup systems (reliability, durability, etc..). How can I go about setting up a tape backup system? The…
John Himmelman
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8mm Data8 tape drive compatibility for Maxell HS-8/112 and 3M D8-112

We have a Exabyte Mammoth-2 tape drive connected to a Solaris 10 box that's currently able to restore any Exabyte media no problem, but we have two other brands of 8mm tape that are shown as "illegal tapes" and ejected by the tape drive…
grephappiness
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Hot Swap Ultra320 SCSI LTO-Tape Drive

Can an Ultra320 SCSI LTO tape drive (or any SCSI device) be hot swapped without needing to power down the system? The current LTO tape drive is the only device on the SCSI host. If the above can be done, then what problem(s) could I run into when…
U85
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tar file modified bit (am I being BS'd to?)

I'm working on a project where I'll be using tar to incrementally backup data on a server to a number of tapes. According to a senior co-worker of mine, tar will "set special flags on files so that it can tell if the files has been modified since…
Russell C
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HP Ultrium 1840 LTO-4 slow write speeds

I have an HP StorageWorks Ultrium 1840 LTO-4 external tape drive attached to a machine running Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS (kernel 4.15.0-99-generic) using an LSI20320IE PCI-X x4 SCSI adaptor with a VHDCI to HD cable. Writing to the tape drive is slow and…
Richard
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Fibre channel: LTO tape overwritten on bus reset

There is a situation that we had at out customer that I'd like to understand better. Here's what happened: A library with LTO tape drives is connected to a fibre channel environment Archiving software running on Windows server 2008 is writing data…
matejk
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Wrong firmware on Ultrium LTO4 1840

A client has an old MSL6030 Tape Library with a pair of LTO4 Ultrium 1840 tape drives in the back. Both have failed. We have procured identical replacements (same part # anyway) and have been unable to get the library to recognise them. I've…
Patrick
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Backup Solutions for 20 TB of data

First, some background on out situation. We're a small-medium business who has around 20 TB of data on two different NAS's, and that number grows by at least 10% annually. 90% of this data we need to keep for legal reasons related to the work we do,…
Zxero88
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Internal LTO tape drive becomes hot

We use an internal LTO3 tape drive (HP Ultrium 920) in a PC (no particular server hardware) running Linux. The tape drive becomes quite hot - I don't have the exact temperature, but you may touch it for a second or two, then it hurts ;-) This…
claasz
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Read LTO Tape ID Tag

LTO 6 Tapes contain a ID tag within the casing (I assume its RFID). Is it possible to read the tag via mt commands? I would like to identify the tape that is currently loaded in the tape drive. I'm not using a tape loader. Thus the barcode scanner…
Jotschi
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Tape drive unusable on 14.04 ESXi VM

The problem I've got an Overland ArcVault connected to my system (actually a virtual machine, with the standalone SCSI card it's connected to in passthrough mode), but it seems like the named tape device nodes (something like /dev/st0 or /dev/nst0)…
Mikey T.K.
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