# ULTRIUM LTO tape drive anyone?

## Master One

Sorry, I didn't wanted to crosspost this, but I just saw, that the older message from April, I just replied to, was in the "Other Things Gentoo" section, which does not seem to be the right forum for this matter.

I was just thinking about purchasing an IBM ULTRIUM LTO 1 internal 100/200GB half high SCSI tape drive (FRU # 59P6685) for my IBM eServer xSeries 226, which I probably can get second hand for about 250,- EURO. 

Any idea, if this unit is support? 

I never had a tape drive before.

Is such a unit easy to handle? 

Is it worth the mentioned price? 

Any other software (but tar) recommended to use with such a tape drive?

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## guero61

AFAIK, SCSI tape is SCSI tape.  There's one driver, 'st'.  I like using app-arch/star for my DAT; how soon are you thinking of purchasing?

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## Master One

 *guero61 wrote:*   

> AFAIK, SCSI tape is SCSI tape.  There's one driver, 'st'.  I like using app-arch/star for my DAT; how soon are you thinking of purchasing?

 

Ah, good to know, I already expected that there would be no problem using such a device with Linux.

Just took a look at star, sounds promising, but the homepage-link from the ebuild seems to be dead.

I think I should decide today, if I'm going to buy the mentioned unit, or not. Why do you ask?

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## guero61

Because I know there are several unused in the lab - I can go grab one and make a more educated statement if you have time.

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## Master One

 *guero61 wrote:*   

> Because I know there are several unused in the lab - I can go grab one and make a more educated statement if you have time.

 

Thanks, guero61, but I have no doubt any more, that such a unit can be used just fine in Linux. ATM I am reconsidering, because the HP Ultrium 232 would be even better, than the Ultrium 215, but I did not fine any reasonable new or second hand offers by now, and it's pretty pricy. The 232 is about double as fast as the 215, but both are 100/200 LTO1 drives. Didn't take a closer look at LTO2 200/400 drives, but if I would find a cheap second hand one, it would be even better (my IBM eServer xSeries 226 actually has 3x 73.4GB U320 SCSI discs in a hardware-raid5, so a LTO1 would do, but I was considering adding another 73.4GB HDD to the raid, and then a LTO2 would be the logical choice).

BTW As you have several unused drives in your lab, if you want to get rid of one of those, just drop me a PM  :Smile: 

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## MattyD32

I guess i dont know about Gentoo, but in my backup and recovery enviroment here at work we have LTO1 LTO2 and LTO3 tape drives, some directly connected to windows and unix box's and some connected through an acssa (library) media server, which for the most part use a unix enviroment. I can almost gaurentee it will work just fine.

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## Master One

Well, still uncertain which tape drive to purchase. Running on a low budget, it looks like I can not afford anything better than a second hand LTO1 100/200.

Someone please tell me:

If you try to copy 300 GB of data to a single LTO1 100/200 tape drive, will this result in an error (due to not enough space left), or will it tell to swap the tape, when the end of the first tape is reached?

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## drwook

Pretty certain that'd have more to do with the software than the hardware, though not one of my major areas of expertise....  Any decent software I'd expect to prompt for a tape change.

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## energyman76b

just load the 'st' driver and write to the drive with tar.

But beware:

LTO have a very high minimal speed (40mb/sec). So if you don't want to ruin your LTO drive use buffer or even better mbuffer! No costumer drive - even if they show impressive numbers with benchmarks, can keep such a high output. They even have problems with 5mb/sec if the data is fragmented. So use a buffer - it will be good for your drives motors, the cardridges and your ears!

With mbuffer it looks like this:

tar -c -b 128 /home/energyman | mbuffer -m 400M -p 95 -s 65536 > /dev/st0

-c create, b 128 is the block size

mbuffer even supports networking, -m is the buffer size, -p is the percentage the buffer should not drop below. st0 is your drive.

A buffer of 400m is pretty small - this is the line I use to backup my home when the box is 'active'. When I am in 'backup mode' I increase it to 800M. The bigger, the better.

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