Tape storage

I've never made a wiki page before. Please be patient with my autism.

What is it?

• Tape storage is commonly used technology for creating backups in enterprise industry. However that didn't stop some autistic people to use it for home usage.
• Magnetic tape is, along with optical and magnetic platters, technologies to store data.
• Tape is a relatively long spooled magnetic tape wrapped up in a plastic case (like VHS, but not a floppy disk). The combination of length and density allows to gain huge storage potential.
• Streamer is a single unit which handles one tape and allows for R/W operations. It requires something to insert/eject tapes (either manually or by some automation)

Tape library is a tool that:

• can store more than one streamer
• can store from hundreds up to thousands
• contains a "robot" which is able to pick those tapes and insert / eject those
• tape cases are mostly labelled with barcode to help with robot navigating
• is fucking expensive. More than your whole NAS / backup investment is worth it already.

Tape solutions tend to have "generations", each aiming mostly for doubling it's size. But some features are being included as well. There is often a term of raw storage and compressed storage (which is 2x raw storage). Now be a smart anon and guess which size producers are printing out in labels?

Pros

• Tape storage key advantage is cost effectiveness, as price per GB/TB is the best one compared to other types.
• NOTE: Some better calculations needs to be done. Those on-sale shucked HDDs might beg to differ.

Cons

• The huge downside is huge entry investment.
• Weak integration with OS
• Slow R/W operations
• Also manually juggling the tapes might fuck you up. Consider the following:
  • How many tapes you need to make a full backup?
  • How often would you need to do that?

Should I consider using it

NO

That was the short answer.

Medium answer: Rather not. The entry investment is pretty expensive.

Long answer: In general some calculations needs to be done to figure whether you should bother at all. Besides you don't want to manually handle dozens of tapes on regular basis.

If anything LTO-5 is absolute minimum you want to consider these days. Not only it has considerable price, but LTFS is good for newbies like me.

How integration with OS looks like

LTO-5 has LTFS, which allows to treat loaded tape like a partition. Pretty great and works well with robocopy command.

Pre LTO-5 and other tape solutions? Not such a thing. Either you need to use some 3rd party software OR some windows versions had this "tape backup".

Dunno about linux, but in best case you can literally type commands to /dev/<tape> to rewind tapes and use dd command to make copies.

Parts

In order to work with that you will need the following:

• For workstation a HBA card which will handle communication with unit.
  • Also consider that the panel size might be dedicated for server PC, not consumer PC.
• Cable itself. Kid you not but it's expense by itself. Be wary as external and internal cables tend to differ.
• Streamer unit. Which is the biggest cake and root of all problems.

Streamer size and types: Streamer has two categories.

First is:

• FH - full height. It's someting about 2 5,25" sizes.
• HH - half height. It takes 1 slot of 5,25" size. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzb-RjkKV3I how it fits nicely PC.

Second is:

• Internal - Most of those is 5,25" size so it should fit PC. Make sure your HBA has internal connectors.
• External - Requires additional AC outlet. Make sure your HBA has external connectors.

HBA card

Host (bus) adapter in short just allows connect with devices via server-type cabling.

Common types

• SCSI - old af. Don't bother with it. Unless you just like retro stuff.
• SAS - SATA on steroids, still used
• FC - optic stuff

Types of tape storage

• LTO - the absolute leader in this industry. AFAIK, nearly every industry is using this.
• DLT - Failed competitor to LTO
• DDS - Latest gen was introduced in 2009 with raw 160GB
• DAT - initially allowed cassette tapes to record music in digital format, later found uses for data storage