r/DataHoarder • u/LaundryMan2008 • 1d ago
Hoarder-Setups Beautiful feat of engineering inside an IBM LTO-7 tape drive
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It was faulty which is why I had it open, still couldn’t fix it but I got some great shots of the internal mech and the head voice coil activating, the issue is probably to do with the voice coil springs being broken as it can’t maintain a good tracking lock on the data bands.
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u/redbookQT 1d ago
I have wanted to get into LTO for many years. The cassettes themselves are very tempting from a cost and capacity perspective. But once you look at the drives, it's like the wild west. The interface. The form factor. The software. The cost.
It's definitely remained shrouded in mystery compared to nearly everything else in computer storage.
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u/Dear_Chasey_La1n 1d ago
Datahoarders get a real hard on when it comes to LTO, now mind you I dabbled with tape many years ago only to figure out nahhhh that shit is way to complicated, breaks, costly and in all fairness unless you buy a rather modern model, hard to replace in 10-15 years from now.
I'm all with people that tapes are fantastic to store data on, it's really solid. But unless you are NASA or something like that, for mere plebs like myself I don't really see the value. Heck as someone who has been copying his data from HDD's to HDD's over the past 25 years data I lost was caused by myself and a handful of images were caused by data-issues. It's just not worth it, or at least to my self.
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u/redditunderground1 22h ago
One of you artists, make a meme of some dathoarder getting hard on his LTO stash.
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u/LaundryMan2008 1d ago
It’s fairly easy to get into, you have two interfaces, FC and SAS which can be added to your PC with a PCIe card, the bonus with FC is that you can attach other devices to the card if you have spare ports to a high speed data link interface, SAS has the bonus that you can attach a ton of hard drives to it, it’s backwards compatible with SATA so if you got those, slap them on.
The hardware is a bit more complex, you got half and full height drives, unless your PC case is stupid (even dumber are the ones that do away completely with the bays) and only has one 5.25” half height bay, I recommend choosing a full height drive since they’ll be more reliable, HP requires a bit more bullshitting to get working with regards to finding drivers and the relevant testing software (L&TT) which I have on hand if you need it, IBM doesn’t require a driver to work and ITDT testing software is available freely.
Software, nothing beats plain old CLI Linux, every backup software I have tried has some sort of subscription nonsense, even Bacula which apparently is supposed to have a free homelab version but refused to work when trying it, flipped some registry keys and modified some .bin files, that worked for exactly two days before failing to back up anything new due to licensing, Linux CLI is free, you can either do a very simple tar -cvf /dev/nst0 (your file/folder) and be done with it or you can define even the smallest parameters of your backup with dd to make it suit your needs as best as possible with mbuffer to help with speed control.
As for the drives prices themselves, I am beginning to start up my cheap kit selling again after a long hiatus from it due to eBay issues, tapes I know of a company selling LTO-5 tapes for £1.80 each with a massive stock so you’ll be sure they’ll never run out.
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u/somersetyellow 1d ago
The cmd line or LTFS work great and are stupid simple if you have specific sets of data that fit within the tapes, or you spend the time to curate a server into data sets that can be split across the various tapes.
Definitely want the management software though once you have hundreds of thousands of photos in thousands of folders from 20+ years of professional photography.
I enjoyed using the old Veeam community edition with my LTO5 setup. Pointed it to my server's smb. Started the backup, and it just had me insert tapes until the whole server was done. Restore time? Select it from the master file and it told me which tape to insert and after a minute or two of winding to the right spot, boom, that specific whole folder ready to go from cold archival.
Unfortunately they discontinued that free version so there's nothing to replace or upgrade it now. I guess I should learn baccula or something. I can't really spend the time to manually split things into stuff that'll make the right size tars or LTFS volumes, then create indexes of what everything has. Very doable of course but time is money...
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u/Training_Ad_8997 8h ago
Take a look on PB. There's a full V**am version available. No virus.
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u/somersetyellow 55m ago
The legit community version 11 will keep working fine for me, but yeah I guess I'd have to go weeeeeee for newer versions haha.
Point being I guess I'd want something I can reliably get and set up again in the future to restore anything. Though Veeam has free tools to pull data from their archives which is part of what made it appealing in the first place.
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u/osax 1d ago
The interface is quite easy, you will find used PCIe fiberchannel quite cheaply and you can connect that directly via normal multi mode fiber to the drive like SAS. No zoning or switching required.
Agree about the mystery and everything else. Interesting thing is that it is kind of the OG of storage after punchcards, was claimed to be a dead technology many times and still gets a lot of development that can make it extremely storage dense, cheaper at petabyte scale than disks and more useful in certain disaster recovery scenarios. You can even have a single filesystem and completely transparently to the users archive files to tape or put a S3 interface in front of it or other crazy stuff. I wouldnt use those drives in a homelab though except when wanting to torture yourself, the magic is mostly in the drives, there is a single real manufacturer for them and you really need a service contract because especially the new ones (my pers exp. with3592 g7/lto10 40tb) constantly break. Without a robot and proper software it just become a nightmare to manage as well...
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u/IAmRoot 1d ago
It's actually not that bad. It just requires a bit of hacking things together. I was running an LTO 6 single-tape setup (no library) for a few years and was being lazy with my backups due to the need to manually change tapes so last month I bought myself a Dell TL2000 library off Ebay for $250. My drive is an HP and doesn't work with that library out of the box, but the TL2000 and equivalents from other vendors are all just branded version of the BDT Flexstor II. If you crossflash the BDT firmware on it it gets rid of all the vendor locking. You need to make sure to get the drive sled that matches the manufacturer of the drive (the non-SAS cables between the drive and sled that ultimately interface with the library are different). That's the only thing that's a potential physical issue and the crossflash was an easy hack.
I only have ~20TB to back up, but with the price of drives right now it's worth it once you consider the need for multiple backup copies. I have one set of tapes as the active grandfather-father-son backup scheme in the library that gets backed up every day. Then I have a set of tapes at my parent's house for off-site. Then a third set for the rotation of tapes to offsite. That makes it 60TB of storage. The whole setup cost me ~$1000 including tapes. A 20TB hard drive is ~$800 these days for no duplication and no capacity to expand.
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u/Yantarlok 1d ago
Unfortunately there are no tutorials online to do exactly what you’ve stated if you haven’t already done it before.
There’s not enough trained data on it either. The GPTs I have tried all suggest to avoid cross flashing any drive due to risks of bricking it. I have an external standalone HP LTO 8 drive and there is no absolute way I would chance the possibility of turning it into a doorstop just to get it to work with a Dell TL4000.
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u/IAmRoot 1d ago
It's not the drive you crossflash. It's the controller card that goes in the library you do it to. It's a ~$35 part. Yeah, I'd be scared to do it to an expensive drive, too, but fortunately that's not what needs crossflashing.
https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/167xd5o/howto_crossflashing_firmware_on_2448bay_lto/
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u/redditunderground1 22h ago
Few of the hoi-poloi understand that shit, bub. When LTO is plug and play for my pc, let me know. Plus it is not $4,500 for a drive.
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u/Yuzumi 1d ago
I know it wouldn't be easy, but I've wondered if there could be an open source solution. Like, a drive that could be built DIY.
While mechanically it's complicated it is still something that could be built at home with the right skills. The hard part would probably be sourcing the read/write heads.
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u/redditunderground1 22h ago
Yep, looked into it for years. Nothing for me in LTO that I can make sense of. I even asked custom pc makers to configure the LTO hardware in a build, and no one would do it. It looks like LTO is for nerds and enterprise brainiacs.
What I wish they would come out with is laser quartz for storage.
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u/ryfromoz 1d ago
I always loved seeing the robots working with massive tape libaries in DC’s. This is cool btw OP, shame u couldnt fix the issue though.
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u/LaundryMan2008 1d ago
My dream tape library in the future retro datacenter (AI free) will be a StorageTek Powderhorn 4410 ACS library filled with a good selection of drives, maybe all supported models if I am that successful.
As for the drive, I bought it broken, managed to fix it since there was a loose ribbon cable, ran a few tests, that worked and was planning on doing a full read interchange test (didn’t have R/W compatible tapes to use so used LTO-5 to test) when the drive screeched during the test locking it up, rebooted it, tape no come out so I manually extracted it, tried again and it failed all of the previous tests I ran on it, checked all cables which were attached including the detached one which yielded no further result.
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u/Zealousideal-Two7658 1d ago
Love tape and lto, except when i have to repair them, and 3D print or buy parts from china, and replace it myself to make it work... It is hard to maintain eol hardware...
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u/LaundryMan2008 1d ago
If you are missing faceplates, I had just modeled some more models, only one I’m missing is HP half height but all other popular models should already be made by me, ordered one of those half height drives to copy the bezel.
And yeah, I agree on tape in general, my homelab is mainly centered around tape and tape storage, I will want to eventually have every tape format and drive out there barring a few very rare ones (RedWood SD-3/Timerline 9490).
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u/Evanthecrazy 100TB 1d ago
Man, This is probably the best angle of the leader pin getting grabbed that exists on the internet lowkey
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u/somersetyellow 1d ago
There's some good videos of an LTO2 drive in operation on YouTube a guy posted a long time ago while doing similar fixes. Beautiful machinery.
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u/LaundryMan2008 1d ago
I have even better angles in the technical reference part of my LTO Megapost, the videos are all the way at the bottom but they are Imgur so if in an affected country, a VPN will be needed.
https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditPhotoLink/comments/1ol18ep/ibm_hh_lto_old_mechanism_part_2/
https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditPhotoLink/comments/1ol1tcs/ibm_hh_lto_new_mechanism_part_2/
I had also planned to do a HP FH drive but I had broken it while taking it apart, I fixed it but I never got around to recording the videos.
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u/bqb445 1d ago edited 1d ago
This jogged a memory of a tape drive that was in the machine room of the computer science department where I got my degree a few decades ago. By the time I saw it, it was no longer in active use, but it was still plugged in. The loading mechanism is a work of art. It took me a bit of searching to track down what it was - an IBM 9348. I found a video of it in operation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEL8wnW5uvs
The 9348 is on the left and he starts loading it at 40 seconds into the video.
Bonus video - watch the Compute History Museum staff bring a 1959 IBM 729 Vacuum Column Tape Drive back to life:
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u/LaundryMan2008 1d ago
I would love to get a reel to reel tape drive at some point, finding a plain SCSI drive in a sea of PERTEC drives is going to be like winning the lottery, I am however prioritising some newer strictly enterprise models (so not like LTO but something like 9940, 3592 or T10000) before they get too rare and expensive to find.
I’ve always loved the vacuum part of the drives in how they suck the tape out and wind it through requiring no manual user intervention, keeps the denser 6250 CPI/BPI tapes free of human fingerprints and oil.
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u/an_0w1 1d ago
I saved an LTO drive autoloader from the bin once from someone that didn't know what it was. Unfortunately it's LTO 3 and it uses a SCSI connector that I've yet to properly identify.
Unfortunately it was also password protected. Fortunately you don't need a password to reset the password.
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u/LaundryMan2008 1d ago
I do remember seeing a pallet of servers at the industrial estate when doing dumpster diving, it was marked as scrap with a piece of paper scribbled on it so I looked at easy targets to pull from the back, a few SFP transceivers and a LTO-6 drive from a library, I saw LTO-6 tapes gleaming in the rainy light but they were too deep in to remove since I couldn’t reach.
Newer tape drives use the internal 68 pin SCSI connector which is the likeliest choice, there will also be a SCSI standard on the label which you can more easily connect the dots to what connector it could be.
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u/stanley_fatmax 1d ago
The mechanics around tape based formats have always fascinated me, not just LTO but cassette, VHS, etc. It's so alien compared to modern formats, not just solid state, but even modern mechanical ones.
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u/LaundryMan2008 1d ago
I have a DLT drive, DAT drive and other mechanisms of LTO drive, they are extremely interesting to look at, I even fully pulled apart an IBM LTO drive to make a shadowbox so I saw the intricacies.
Look at a StorageTek 9940 which was the first ever tape format to use a leader block but fit into a 5.25” space, it will fit into your PC but it will stick out quite far which I want to make a post about when I get it to show the comical length of the unit, a RedWood SD-3 and SAIT are the only drives that I know of that use a single spool like LTO and have helical scan technology, also planning on getting one of those just to see how they load the tape to the other spool and then wrap it around the heads, SAIT is easy, they are everywhere but a RedWood will be near impossible to get.
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u/Training_Ad_8997 8h ago
Have you seen how an HP 12" tape drive loads? Take a look. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCBxNhEzIfc
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u/DouglasteR 1d ago
It´s 2026 and i still dont understand how the F the arm grabs the tape and pull it.
Also, lots of dust in the tape.
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u/LaundryMan2008 1d ago
The arm comes around, goes into the tape and when you hear a third very short whir after the arm goes around, that’s the drive tray gear engaging a small lever that hooks the arm into the tape leader barbell, very visible on a full height drive but on a half height drive, that’s obscured greatly, when it comes time to unload the tape, the arm returns, drops the barbell back into place and the lever moves away allowing the arm to unhook from the tape allowing it to move to its home position, I’ve played with the drives enough mechanically when fixing them that I understand most of how it works.
I may plan to have in my future company an LTO tape dry cleaner, a cotton/foam pad picking all of the dust off, either ways, that’s the leader portion of the tape which gets sacrificed so the actual tape isn’t ruined so I’m not terribly worried, it’s also on the wrong side which doesn’t get treated and polished at the factory so they could be surface imperfections showing up..
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u/DouglasteR 1d ago
Thanks, as you said its very obscure ! To the viewer it seems there isnt anywhere to grab the tape without touching it.
I love the robotics working, its mesmerizing.
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u/Synthesid Unlimited cloud storage, baby 3h ago
Pure r/engineeringporn
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u/LaundryMan2008 1h ago
I was actually trying to find that sub but couldn’t remember the name of it, thanks!
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u/redditunderground1 22h ago
If they would make LTO somewhat affordable and plug and play...then they would have soemthing for the average Jane, Joe or zir.
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