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I recently got an external SAS LTO-5 tape drive from eBay for my NAS at home, and a SAS PCI-E adapter - this is the sas2flash
output:
LSI Corporation SAS2 Flash Utility Version 20.00.00.00 (2014.09.18) Copyright (c) 2008-2014 LSI Corporation. All rights reserved Adapter Selected is a LSI SAS: SAS2008(B1) Num Ctlr FW Ver NVDATA x86-BIOS PCI Addr ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 0 SAS2008(B1) 20.00.07.00 14.01.00.06 07.01.00.00 00:01:00:00 Finished Processing Commands Successfully. Exiting SAS2Flash.
I had to flash a new firmware on the card (it had a "fault state" message on dmesg
, but now it's fixed) and had to patch the LTFS userspace tools to get them to recognize this model, since it's made by IBM but a Dell rebrand. The patch is here.
All is good, but I'm getting poor performance from it. Usually, reads from my RAID5 array are in the 70-110MB/s range over Samba to the rest of my home network, but I can only get the tape drive connected to it via the SAS port on the adapter card to do ~22 MB/s, which makes filling up a 1.5TB tape a lengthy ordeal.
Is there any way to debug where the problem may lie? The NAS is on a mini-ITX motherboard and rocks 8GB of ram and a 4x3TB RAID5 array, plus a boot SSD connected to one of the adapter card's internal SATA ports. The SFF-8088 cable is 1.5m long, but the drive just currently stands on top of the NAS case.
Any help appreciated!
What software are you using to write to the tape? I found a lot of software that couldn't even keep an LTO3 drive busy. – Jamie Hanrahan – 2017-03-10T09:52:53.537
I'm just using LTFS, haven't tried using
– Bruno Antunes – 2017-03-10T12:05:20.777tar
yet.