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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Thinking about getting an LTO system

Rick Darge said:
What do you guys think of the Hewlett Packard LTO-4 1840 model? These guys like it, http://www.studiodaily.com/main/searchlist/LTO4-Tape-Archiving-on-the-Mac_11294.html
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These units are great. Very solid. I bought an HP LTO-5 drive, and now have an HP LTO-4 unit I'll sell if you want to PM me. It works really well with an ATTO card in a Mac tower. Frankly, I don't find the LTO-5 significantly better - I bought it to take advantage of LTFS Mike talks about above, but have not been able to make that really work yet. I'm using BRU, and Tolis has said they will be supporting that, but not yet AFAIK.
 
The HP 1840 is great. For all intents and purposes, it's the same as the half-height HP 1760 model, but a bit faster.

I second Steve's recommendation of going LTO-5. And for LTO-5 right now, the best recommendation I can make is the HP desktop unit with the ATTO controller. The ATTO H680 is 6Gbps and has two external mini-SAS ports, each has 4x6Gbps channels for SAS/SATA inside them. There's also the H6F0 controller, which is the same, but has 4 of those mini-SAS connectors. You can connect eSATA devices to the controller using a proper cable. I like the HighPoint mini-SAS to 4x eSATA fan-out cable (about $50).

If you want to save some money, get the HP LTO-4, either the 1760 or 1840 model. It won't be quite as future proof, but can save you $500 or more at the moment, depending on where you buy. The tapes are cheaper too. Even if you go with LTO-5, you may find that you'll be buying more LTO-4 tapes to start off with. They're still a good bit cheaper in terms of $$/GB... For now... But you will obviously need double the amount of shelf space to store your data.
 
Thanks guys... And David.. I PMed you... I also found an amazing deal on a Quantel LTO-3 unit from a friend that I'm thinking about getting. It runs off Ethernet... I know LTO-3 is slow and doesn't have a large amount of capacity but I'm just looking for long term archival storage really for projects that I don't need to pull up for a long time..
 
DO NOT, I MEAN ***DO NOT*** BUY THAT QUANTUM LTO-3A SYSTEM!!!! No disrespect to your friend and whatnot, but those systems are slow, clunky and buggy. They have been discontinued and the only units on the market now that you can use to read their tapes, other than an old LTO-3A system, are some of the units from Cache-A. LTO-3 is a step backward, only 400GB per tape and those A-series units use a proprietary format and don't work with other tape software like BRU. You basically use their web-based front end (javascript) to copy files over to the unit. When you are ready to write those files to a tape, you insert the tape and write it. They have an FTP interface as well, but it's garbage. Quantum pulled the plug on the A-series LTO concept when it was only half-baked.

So, just saying that your "amazing deal" is probably not so amazing. I personally wouldn't give anyone $50 for one of those things.
 
I had nothing but trouble in a big way with Quantum and Retrospect and am still paying the price.

Best thing you could do is call Tolis Group and let them hook you up. After the Quantum/Retrospect DEBACLE, Tolis set me up great with Bru and an LTO5. No problems at all. Simple to use. Very helpful people, too.

Kevin
 
Oh, yeah, listen to Kevin. You don't want Retrospect software.
 
So Tolis will come down from their online advertised prices? they have a package deal for LTO-5 but it's almost $4k and that's way too high for me.. I didn't really want to spend more than 2500 for a complete setup.. preferably less.. and I'm OK with LTO-4 for my needs right now..
 
Rick Darge said:
So Tolis will come down from their online advertised prices? they have a package deal for LTO-5 but it's almost $4k and that's way too high for me.. I didn't really want to spend more than 2500 for a complete setup.. preferably less.. and I'm OK with LTO-4 for my needs right now..
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I hear ya man, like I said it's a tough pill to swallow upfront. But, you still need three components no matter what. An ATTO card, the LTO4 or LTO5 machine, and software to run it. And cables too.
Bru PE - $500
ATTO Card $360
HP LTO 5 - $2500
Total - $3360

If you substitute for LTO 4 maybe between $2800-$3000. There may be some killer deals out there on LTO 4 which I guess is probably the only way to bring it down to under $2500. Certainly might be possible.
 
Is LTO-4 really all that bad? I mean, most of you guys getting LTO-5 are still using LTO-4 tapes..
 
Rick, I had the same issues as you when it came time to finally buck up and get an lto system.

After months of research, and going back and fourth, and back again.... I ended up with bru and lto5. I don't regret it. Lto5 is worth saving up for over lto4, just for the extra generation of future proofing alone.

Though I'm still using mostly lto4 tape, I know i have the ability to move forward in the future, and i feel that extra value was worth the extra $$

Just go for the bru pe bundle and don't look back!
 
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Where's the cheapest and most reliable place to buy LTO-4 tapes? And I can theoretically fit up to 1.6TB onto a single 800GB tape using the 2:1 compression scheme? That's awesome if that's the case..
 
Rick Darge said:
Where's the cheapest and most reliable place to buy LTO-4 tapes? And I can theoretically fit up to 1.6TB onto a single 800GB tape using the 2:1 compression scheme? That's awesome if that's the case..
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Id not use compression on tape. You already have compressed data.
 
Any reason why no compression? What's the point of that option then?
 
Id be interested to see what other guys thing about this but usually we are dealing with compressed data and you cannot make the file significantly smaller by recompressing it. If it does get smaller, you are using a poor compression algorithm. If its uncompressed data then, yes, theres an advantage.
 
In LTO systems, the compression is done by the hardware and is on by default. Just leave it alone (on). Most highly-compressed data, like R3D, ZIP, JPEG, etc.. will not gain any further compression. However, you will see a benefit for other files that are not so compressed, like TIFF without LZW/ZIP compression, XML, SQL databases, etc. I find that when archiving a system/apps HDD to a tape, I see noticeable benefits to the compression.
 
Dave Blackham said:
Id be interested to see what other guys thing about this but usually we are dealing with compressed data and you cannot make the file significantly smaller by recompressing it. If it does get smaller, you are using a poor compression algorithm. If its uncompressed data then, yes, theres an advantage.
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So Id agree with Jeff (post above) leave that the default is compression is on by default but don't expect compressed files to get any smaller because they wont and as a rule of thumb work to 800GB not 1.6GB for LTO4 on tape for media.
 
After reading threads like this I'm beginning to realize that the money from the sale of my RED MX is going right into things for my Epic. LTO has been something that I have been looking at for a long time. Maybe I could just use the one as work and pay for the media. That would be way cheaper.
 
Gonna bite that bullet and get the LTO-5 bundle and BRU from Solaris. Ouch but buy once cry once. Epic data rates deserve LTO. Never thought I would be going back to tape... Jeff, where do you get your Fuji LTO tapes from?
 
I shop around for tapes. have actually had decent luck on ebay and occasionally on Amazon lately. My last tape purchase was three 20-packs on ebay. Came to less than $21/tape after shipping, for Fuji Ultrium-4 tapes. All unopened packages. What Dave says above is correct, always work to 800GB. In fact, with BRU, you should plan on about 750GB per tape (more like 745 if all is compressed data). Their data format encodes extra parity bits and redundant pieces. In theory, if one part of the tape becomes corrupt, there's a good possibility that the data can be rebuilt from another section of the tape, assuming the corruption isn't too big or severe. You will have to come up with a backup strategy and workflow that suits your purposes.

You don't have to buy 20-packs like I do a lot. I can usually find tapes for about the same price per each in 5 packs, even individually sometimes, on ebay. Just did a quick ebay search for "fuji ultrium 4" and found a couple 5-packs for $100. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be much on there tonight for LTO-4 tapes, so prices look a bit inflated. Not a good day to shop there... Actually, I just checked Provantage and a couple other places. Prices are up today and it seems stock is down. $24.02 on Amazon from ANTonline and they only have 19 left in stock. Kinda weird.
 
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