Tape storage

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

What is it?

Tape storage is commonly used type of creating backups in enterprise industry. However that didn't stop some autistic people to use it for home usage. Tape is one of three types (along with optical and magnetic) to store data.

They are popular because the tapes are cost effective, as price per GB/TB is the best one compared to other types. However the tape recording unit, i.e. streamer is quite expensive. Therefore it is a matter of huge discussion for data hoarders whether to use or not use the tape.

In industry case, thousands of tapes are being rotated to store fuckton of data. (some services might store server images from last week / month so go wild with numbers). See here how the extreme automation might look like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kiNWOhl00Ao

Tapes are good medium to store OUTSIDE the house / site where the storage is running. It might serve as a "worst case" scenario recovery. Imagine your house being burned or robbed.

Tape solutions tend to have "generations", each aiming mostly for doubling it's size. 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?

Short setup introduction

In order to work with that you will need 3 things for your workstation:

• For workstation a HBA card which will handle communication with unit. Depending on generation it will vary between SCSI, SAS or FC. (SCSI is for old ones)
  • 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.

Types of tape storage

• LTO - the absolute leader in this industry. AFAIK, nearly every industry is using this.
• DDS - outdated, not produced anymore, their latest generation size ceased to be even close to LTO-5 generation.
• DLT - "retarder cousin" of LTO? Also ceased to exist at some point