Rudy Lehfeldt-Ehlinger
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Scott that is exactly what i plan to do also until the price of LTO 6 comes down to about $50 seems like cost wise LTO5 and a LTO 6 deck is the way to go for sure...
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Is LTO the way to go for backup and archive?
- Thread starter Scott Pultz
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Jeff Kilgroe
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In my experience, some of the HP units are a bit snappier. I had better reliability with HP over Quantum for LTO-4, but LTO-5 seems to be the same either way. I don't yet have any LTO-6 experience to speak of in terms of performance or reliability. HP drives have superior compatibility with OSX, the SAS models primarily when paired with an ATTO host adapter.
Firmware. HP's software reliably talks to the HP drives, but not necessarily those of other manufacturers. And as Jeff said, they do seem a bit more compatible with Mac hosts. The mechanisms are identical. The firmware is not.
Charo Sanchez
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If you are looking for an LTFS solution on a Windows PC check out XenData. The workstation archive software is cost effective and easy to use.
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Paul J. Helin
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Sorry to revive an old thread but just recently started looking into backup solutions for client raw material. Have no personal experience with LTO but what I have read on the internet, seems pretty straight forward... and basically seems like the smartest option even for a small production house with the need to keep client material for later edits.
Anyways a couple of questions: Anyone know if the mLogic mTape is out and functional? Long time since they first announced the product.
Also, the size of a LTO-6 tape is marked as 6,25TB packed and 2,5TB native. Is there a downside on using tapes at 6,25TB? That is a huge gap and have a ton of r3d to archive.
Thanks!
-Paul
Anyways a couple of questions: Anyone know if the mLogic mTape is out and functional? Long time since they first announced the product.
Also, the size of a LTO-6 tape is marked as 6,25TB packed and 2,5TB native. Is there a downside on using tapes at 6,25TB? That is a huge gap and have a ton of r3d to archive.
Thanks!
-Paul
Jordan Livingston
Well-known member
Paul, I'll take a stab at this. I'm not an expert, but I do make LTO-6 and LTO-5 archives on occasion. I've never utilized the compression feature. My understanding is that compressed data files such as video (i.e. R3D files) are already compressed nearly as much as they can be, and won't compress much further. The tradeoff to using compression with the LTO tapes is speed. As it stands, filling up a 2.5 TB LTO-6 mag takes about 6 hours with verification. Enabling compression could add significant time to the process. The same is true on the restoration end, if you ever need to restore your data. With R3D files, the space saving results would be minimal. At least, that's my understanding.
Best,
- Jordan
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Jeff Kilgroe
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Tape is pretty straight forward these days, but you do need to know a bit about interfaces, brands, etc.. And if you're connecting to a Mac, the combination of tape drive and host adapter are definitely something to pay attention to because not all will play nicely together in the Mac environment.
LTO tapes have a native capacity and compressed capacity, you will want to figure everything based on the native capacity. Compression is done on the fly via a relatively arcane RLE process and files that are already highly compressed like ZIP, JPG, MP4, R3D, etc.. won't endure further compression while being written to tape, so you don't gain anything there. Text based, files like HTML or Word documents, database files and other such things that are not compressed to begin with will see compression there, sometimes as high as 3:1. That makes little difference in the grand scheme of things for most users doing what we do here -- our large and already highly compressed or "dense" media files tend to dwarf everything else.
That said, on an LTO-6 tape, you can figure getting around 2.1 to 2.2 TB written to each tape. Sometimes a bit more.
As for that mLogic tape mTape thing, it will probably be OK when or if it ever does show up. If it does show up, it's going to be very late and probably not worth the wait. And it's nothing more than a Thunderbolt PCIe to SAS bridge bundled into the same enclosure with the tape drive itself. So it saves you having to go from Thunderbolt to a PCIe expansion box like a Magma or Sonnet with a SAS host card inside, then to a tape unit. It does not eliminate the middle-man in terms of eliminating the PCIe expansion box, it just puts it inside the same box as the tape drive.
LTO tape for archive purposes has been growing in popularity over the past few years, but the key companies making tape drives are very closed-minded when it comes to considering new interfaces. I've personally suggested to some of the guys at HP's storage division that they need LTO drives, as well as SSDs and HDDs, that use PCIe interfaces with the ability to direct-attach to Thunderbolt. They thought I was nuts. …And here we are, nearly 2 years after I had that specific meeting and while we don't have any PCIe/Thunderbolt tape mechanisms in sight, SSDs have already gone that way, and HDDs are following suit.
LTO tapes have a native capacity and compressed capacity, you will want to figure everything based on the native capacity. Compression is done on the fly via a relatively arcane RLE process and files that are already highly compressed like ZIP, JPG, MP4, R3D, etc.. won't endure further compression while being written to tape, so you don't gain anything there. Text based, files like HTML or Word documents, database files and other such things that are not compressed to begin with will see compression there, sometimes as high as 3:1. That makes little difference in the grand scheme of things for most users doing what we do here -- our large and already highly compressed or "dense" media files tend to dwarf everything else.
That said, on an LTO-6 tape, you can figure getting around 2.1 to 2.2 TB written to each tape. Sometimes a bit more.
As for that mLogic tape mTape thing, it will probably be OK when or if it ever does show up. If it does show up, it's going to be very late and probably not worth the wait. And it's nothing more than a Thunderbolt PCIe to SAS bridge bundled into the same enclosure with the tape drive itself. So it saves you having to go from Thunderbolt to a PCIe expansion box like a Magma or Sonnet with a SAS host card inside, then to a tape unit. It does not eliminate the middle-man in terms of eliminating the PCIe expansion box, it just puts it inside the same box as the tape drive.
LTO tape for archive purposes has been growing in popularity over the past few years, but the key companies making tape drives are very closed-minded when it comes to considering new interfaces. I've personally suggested to some of the guys at HP's storage division that they need LTO drives, as well as SSDs and HDDs, that use PCIe interfaces with the ability to direct-attach to Thunderbolt. They thought I was nuts. …And here we are, nearly 2 years after I had that specific meeting and while we don't have any PCIe/Thunderbolt tape mechanisms in sight, SSDs have already gone that way, and HDDs are following suit.