Hi all, I need some help and advice with LTO tape drives. I haven't kept up with tape technology for several years now and from a quick google, it appears that the only games in town are LTO and DDS. We do have a single DDS deployment and we are looking at replacing it with LTO because of capacity limitations.
Some questions: (1) It appears that LTO-5 is the current technology. But most single drives use SAS as an interface. Again, I am not familiar with SAS. All I know is what the acronym stands for. Is it a simple matter of buying a SAS card? Will it run out of the box on a SL6.x box? Any issues with drivers? (2) I see that LTO-4 is still available. And a quick google suggests that Ultra160 or 320 LVD SCSI is the more common interface for these drives. I have several of the Adaptec 29xxx cards, made available when we transitioned to SATA. Is this viable or would you recommend against using LTO-4? It appears to be about 5 years old. I think it would be preferable to use technology that has at least some life to it but I am not inclined to work very hard to make LTO-5 work if it is not well supported on Linux. We are not looking to do anything fancy. A single internal drive and a box of tapes. Backups the old fashioned way. Specific recommendations welcomed. As in, buy this card, buy this drive! Thanks!
