How are you using SMR based drives?
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@MattSpeller said:
@scottalanmiller said:
LTO 8 is supposed to hit 427MB/s sustained once it releases. Which we don't have a date for yet.
That's all uncompressed. LTO7 compressed is often do 750MB/s. Faster than even decently large RAID arrays in many cases. And that's to a single drive, not a tape array.
So, just as a quick comparison, you would generally expect 20 NL-SAS drives in RAID 10 to be needed to match the typical write performance of a single LTO7 tape drive today.
Damn rights! Tape is FAST!
Lots of people actually wear out their tape drive heads and cartridges by not being able to push data at them fast enough. This causes repeated wind/rewind and repeated writes and all sorts of other nonsense. Always make sure you can blast your tape with more speed than it can handle.
Really? I had no idea... but of course that completely makes sense.
Pretty soon we'll see tape drives with TB's of onboard storage so it can be cached there before actually being written to tape.
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@Dashrender said:
@MattSpeller said:
@scottalanmiller said:
LTO 8 is supposed to hit 427MB/s sustained once it releases. Which we don't have a date for yet.
That's all uncompressed. LTO7 compressed is often do 750MB/s. Faster than even decently large RAID arrays in many cases. And that's to a single drive, not a tape array.
So, just as a quick comparison, you would generally expect 20 NL-SAS drives in RAID 10 to be needed to match the typical write performance of a single LTO7 tape drive today.
Damn rights! Tape is FAST!
Lots of people actually wear out their tape drive heads and cartridges by not being able to push data at them fast enough. This causes repeated wind/rewind and repeated writes and all sorts of other nonsense. Always make sure you can blast your tape with more speed than it can handle.
Really? I had no idea... but of course that completely makes sense.
Pretty soon we'll see tape drives with TB's of onboard storage so it can be cached there before actually being written to tape.
That's more or less how you're supposed to design them ideally. Build a slave target box full of HDDs you'd back up to hourly / daily / whatever then let loose with the tape at night / weekly for one big monster write job all at once. With a decent sized tape library with dual drives you'd be hard pressed to keep it well fed with data otherwise. Bonus is recovery time for the live data on the slave box is really fast.
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@Dashrender said:
@MattSpeller said:
@scottalanmiller said:
LTO 8 is supposed to hit 427MB/s sustained once it releases. Which we don't have a date for yet.
That's all uncompressed. LTO7 compressed is often do 750MB/s. Faster than even decently large RAID arrays in many cases. And that's to a single drive, not a tape array.
So, just as a quick comparison, you would generally expect 20 NL-SAS drives in RAID 10 to be needed to match the typical write performance of a single LTO7 tape drive today.
Damn rights! Tape is FAST!
Lots of people actually wear out their tape drive heads and cartridges by not being able to push data at them fast enough. This causes repeated wind/rewind and repeated writes and all sorts of other nonsense. Always make sure you can blast your tape with more speed than it can handle.
Really? I had no idea... but of course that completely makes sense.
Pretty soon we'll see tape drives with TB's of onboard storage so it can be cached there before actually being written to tape.
If by "pretty soon" you mean "a decade ago." Then... YES!
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@MattSpeller said:
That's more or less how you're supposed to design them ideally.
For those not aware, it is known as "Disk 2 Disk 2 Tape" or D2D2T.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@MattSpeller said:
That's more or less how you're supposed to design them ideally.
For those not aware, it is known as "Disk 2 Disk 2 Tape" or D2D2T.
I'd suggest something more like:
D2D2T2[offsite storage company that will rotate your tape back to you while maintaining 12 months of monthly so you don't have to buy an endless quantity of tape (which most of them will happily sell / bring to you automatically for your permanent year end one until you accumulate enough years that they can rotate those back to you as well (typically 5 to 10) which I highly recommend because putting the stickers on each tape (@*#&% SUCKS and if you're off by a millimeter it'll jam up and cause headaches in your autoloader that'll have you cursing like a sailor while fishing little bits of sticky goo off the rails of the autoloader don't ask me how I know!!!! inhales).]
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
@MattSpeller said:
@scottalanmiller said:
LTO 8 is supposed to hit 427MB/s sustained once it releases. Which we don't have a date for yet.
That's all uncompressed. LTO7 compressed is often do 750MB/s. Faster than even decently large RAID arrays in many cases. And that's to a single drive, not a tape array.
So, just as a quick comparison, you would generally expect 20 NL-SAS drives in RAID 10 to be needed to match the typical write performance of a single LTO7 tape drive today.
Damn rights! Tape is FAST!
Lots of people actually wear out their tape drive heads and cartridges by not being able to push data at them fast enough. This causes repeated wind/rewind and repeated writes and all sorts of other nonsense. Always make sure you can blast your tape with more speed than it can handle.
Really? I had no idea... but of course that completely makes sense.
Pretty soon we'll see tape drives with TB's of onboard storage so it can be cached there before actually being written to tape.
If by "pretty soon" you mean "a decade ago." Then... YES!
I meant specifically the tape drive itself having a cache, not a tape drive sitting in a D2D2T. I'm very familiar with this setup.
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@Dashrender said:
I meant specifically the tape drive itself having a cache, not a tape drive sitting in a D2D2T. I'm very familiar with this setup.
That's all that that is. No, it isn't "built in" but given how backups work, would you want that? You need the cache to be so customized to the situation at hand that realistically you would not want it built in. You might need to cache a few GB or hundreds of TB.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
I meant specifically the tape drive itself having a cache, not a tape drive sitting in a D2D2T. I'm very familiar with this setup.
That's all that that is. No, it isn't "built in" but given how backups work, would you want that? You need the cache to be so customized to the situation at hand that realistically you would not want it built in. You might need to cache a few GB or hundreds of TB.
yeah this was a situation where I didn't think the question all the way through before posting... As soon as the other guy mentioned the backup server - i was like.. uh yeah.. duh!.. lol
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@KOOLER said:
We're working with Seagate now to make their 8TB (and 10 and 14 soon) drives usable for ANYTHING but it turns out even log-structured file system eliminating random and small writes does not help much. Still trying to find a solution, no ETA yet.
Are you looking at mostly host managed solutions in this case to get the best performance?
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@MattSpeller said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@MattSpeller said:
That's more or less how you're supposed to design them ideally.
For those not aware, it is known as "Disk 2 Disk 2 Tape" or D2D2T.
I'd suggest something more like:
D2D2T2[offsite storage company that will rotate your tape back to you while maintaining 12 months of monthly so you don't have to buy an endless quantity of tape (which most of them will happily sell / bring to you automatically for your permanent year end one until you accumulate enough years that they can rotate those back to you as well (typically 5 to 10) which I highly recommend because putting the stickers on each tape (@*#&% SUCKS and if you're off by a millimeter it'll jam up and cause headaches in your autoloader that'll have you cursing like a sailor while fishing little bits of sticky goo off the rails of the autoloader don't ask me how I know!!!! inhales).]
Too bad many of us have to keep backup forever to comply with laws.
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@Jason Forever? What the heck do you do? Legal stuff?
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@Jason said:
Too bad many of us have to keep backup forever to comply with laws.
Not TOO many of us. That's a pretty rare requirement.
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@MattSpeller said:
@Jason Forever? What the heck do you do? Legal stuff?
SEC is seven years. So can't be that one.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Jason said:
Too bad many of us have to keep backup forever to comply with laws.
Not TOO many of us. That's a pretty rare requirement.
Indeed and if you have extra years of backups it can be a liability for the business
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@scottalanmiller said:
@MattSpeller said:
@Jason Forever? What the heck do you do? Legal stuff?
SEC is seven years. So can't be that one.
Medical is 7 years also - except for minor, then it's 21 yrs old + 2.
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@MattSpeller said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@Jason said:
Too bad many of us have to keep backup forever to comply with laws.
Not TOO many of us. That's a pretty rare requirement.
Indeed and if you have extra years of backups it can be a liability for the business
Sad how many don't realize this. But like people having bad passwords - they won't change until they are forced to due to someone stealing their identity - and even then many don't bother changing their ways.
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@MattSpeller said:
@Jason Forever? What the heck do you do? Legal stuff?
SEC is seven years. So can't be that one.
Medical is 7 years also - except for minor, then it's 21 yrs old + 2.
We call that 23.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@MattSpeller said:
@Jason Forever? What the heck do you do? Legal stuff?
SEC is seven years. So can't be that one.
Medical is 7 years also - except for minor, then it's 21 yrs old + 2.
We call that 23.
LOL - don't ask me why the law is written this way... it's just weird.
What's odd is that it's not the age of majority + 2, that would be 19 + 2 in Nebraska = 21... -
Currently using a couple of 8TB SMR Seagate Archive model drive for longer term archive storage.
Matter of fact, in the few rounds of surface testing to see how it holds up, it seems to develop slow reads quite early. Still new technology in production, therefore not much data available to analyze as far as reliability goes.
Definitely not designed for RAIDs or anything performance oriented.
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@MattSpeller said:
@Jason Forever? What the heck do you do? Legal stuff?
A class action lawsuit 15 years ago, they lost but the outcome of that was everyone in the industry now has to keep all data forever. (Not to mention what they said the companies where doing as they tried against about 10 companies was not illegal)
