LTO 2 as long term storage?

evinsky

evinsky

Well-known member
I know the Camera House in Burbank uses this backup technology to archive thier Viper footage from the D-mags. I found this single height SCSI drive for about $2k.
http://www.pcconnection.com/ProductDetail?Sku=5923445
Now the dirve's a bit steep but the media is downright affordable. 200GB for $40.00.
http://www.backupworks.com/index.asp?PageAction=VIEWPROD&ProdID=341
With transfer rates of 24MB per second you could archive 200 Minutes of 1080 HVX footage in less than 2.4 hours. Even faster and more data if you go compressed.

Anyone have any experience with LTO? Does it work like a regular HDD transfer or do you have to use backup software. Anyway I'm thinging this may be a good solution.
 
evinsky said:
I know the Camera House in Burbank uses this backup technology to archive thier Viper footage from the D-mags. I found this single height SCSI drive for about $2k.
http://www.pcconnection.com/ProductDetail?Sku=5923445
Now the dirve's a bit steep but the media is downright affordable. 200GB for $40.00.
http://www.backupworks.com/index.asp?PageAction=VIEWPROD&ProdID=341
With transfer rates of 24MB per second you could archive 200 Minutes of 1080 HVX footage in less than 2.4 hours. Even faster and more data if you go compressed.

Anyone have any experience with LTO? Does it work like a regular HDD transfer or do you have to use backup software. Anyway I'm thinging this may be a good solution.
Click to expand...

HEy!

All I can tell you is that these drives are generally sold with back up software that allows you do drag and drop stuff for archival.

I've been researching along the same lines and had settled upon the Quantum dlt-v4. It turns out it might not be a good solution for me int he end, however, since I am operating with a laptop in the field, and I have been told that the use of a 68 pin to 50 pin adaptor plus a 50 pin scsi to usb2 adaptor may introduce corruption risks and a slow down of transfer speed.

So I'm now looking at the Sony AIT tape drive (80 to 200gb capacity, 12mb/sec sustained transfer rate) because it comes in a USB2/firewire flavor.

The quest continues.

M.
 
Evinsky,


I have decided on the same technology for my backup solution for my studio.
LTO 2 seems to be the best of speed, storage and price. My friend just recently installed the HP LTO 3 type drive in Mongolioa for some missionaries. He said it was very simple to get data on and off the tapes.

I am looking at getting five 200Gb tapes and using the 2:1 compression to minimize the price per gigabyte.

$200 for 2TB not to bad!
 
A company I worked for used LTO for all their backups, mostly data and some video feed from security cameras, but a lot of their IT guys said it's the best way to go. The company I work for now uses a LTO backup system and they support hundreds of customers across all 50 states.

Plus, 200GB for $40, that's a steal!
 
you need to check if you can even get any compression - estimates are based on certain types of data and since the footage is compressed already i wouldnt be surprised i fyou get very little.

just try to zip up an MXF file in windows - my bet is it almost doesnt shrink
 
Lto 3

Lto 3

We just picked up an LTO-3 Autoloader from Exabyte. 7 x 400 GB tapes at once. Super fast. If you can afford to get LTO-3 the transfer time is much faster.

Tim
 
LTO is a great technology and more rugged that AIT. Just make sure your system can REALLY provide the sustained data rate of your LTO-drive. THIS IS VITAL! If the drive has to drop from streaming mode you're not only ruining your overall performance but you will kill your drive sooner or later.

You won't get any compression at all with video data (just some header compression - 1%).

Tandberg has also some great drives and mini-loaders.
 
JanBee said:
LTO is a great technology and more rugged that AIT. Just make sure your system can REALLY provide the sustained data rate of your LTO-drive. THIS IS VITAL! If the drive has to drop from streaming mode you're not only ruining your overall performance but you will kill your drive sooner or later.

You won't get any compression at all with video data (just some header compression - 1%).

Tandberg has also some great drives and mini-loaders.
Click to expand...

Hey JanBee,

Can you qualify 'rugged'? I'm curious because I just put through my purchase of the Sony AIT drive and would like to know exactly what the difference in ruggedness between LTO and AIT technologies is...
I could probably only afford a first generation LTO drive... AIT-2 seems to be respected out there and I'll get faster transfer speeds than with anything else I could afford.
But as I said, the laptop situation made it a requirement that the drive I purchase must have an interface my laptop can talk to... I'm just hoping I haven't sacrificed too much reliability in the process!

M.
 
Thanks guys, I think LTO-3 may be out of my price range but I like the LTO-2 price/erformance ratio. Almost none of my HD projects have been ome than 150GB so this still gives me some overhead.
 
Malcolm said:
Can you qualify 'rugged'?
Click to expand...

My brother has a company who is a Tandberg, adic, Storagetek, etc dealer. The tech guys say that LTO (like DLT) uses a "simple" linear system, meaning, there is a simple non-moving read-write head with the tape passing by. AIT (which is [if I recall correctly] basically 8mm video tape technology as DAT was 4mm) is helical, meaning you have a rotating head drum with the tape wrapped around half of the drum.

With AIT you have a more complex system with a far higher tape-to-head contact, which reduces long-term reliability. All the DAT and AIT systems for high-volume backup (I'm talking about running 4 to 10 hours every night) failed after some months. The LTOs and DLTs did not.

This gets even worse when you can't hold up the data rate of the tape drive. If the drive has to drop from streaming mode (because data is not provided fast enough) this means a tremendous stress situation for the drive. For the AIT even more than for LTO. In fact, this "miscalculation" of data rates per second is the number one killer for tape drives.

The latest generation tape drives are REALLY fast. So make sure you can keep the data rate - that shouldn't be a problem for local video drives, but a firewire drive might turn out to be too slow. Dunno. Check! :-)

Thats what they say!
 
JanBee said:
My brother has a company who is a Tandberg, adic, Storagetek, etc dealer. The tech guys say that LTO (like DLT) uses a "simple" linear system, meaning, there is a simple non-moving read-write head with the tape passing by. AIT (which is [if I recall correctly] basically 8mm video tape technology as DAT was 4mm) is helical, meaning you have a rotating head drum with the tape wrapped around half of the drum.

With AIT you have a more complex system with a far higher tape-to-head contact, which reduces long-term reliability. All the DAT and AIT systems for high-volume backup (I'm talking about running 4 to 10 hours every night) failed after some months. The LTOs and DLTs did not.

This gets even worse when you can't hold up the data rate of the tape drive. If the drive has to drop from streaming mode (because data is not provided fast enough) this means a tremendous stress situation for the drive. For the AIT even more than for LTO. In fact, this "miscalculation" of data rates per second is the number one killer for tape drives.

The latest generation tape drives are REALLY fast. So make sure you can keep the data rate - that shouldn't be a problem for local video drives, but a firewire drive might turn out to be too slow. Dunno. Check! :-)

Thats what they say!
Click to expand...

Thanks for the info!
I had heard that too - about the necessity for providing the drive with data fast enough to keep up with the write speed... It seems like a pretty retarded situation: you'd think it would be rather simple for the drive to evaluate what the system's current throughput capability is for the backup at hand, and to adjust the write speed accordingly to avoid the stress. I think some drives do that, but I don't think mine does. *shrug* This thing just better not die on me in the middle of this project, or I swear you all will here my scream from the other side of the world. :)

M.
 
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