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Ask Slashdot: Personal Tape Drive NAS?
New submitter hey_popey writes "I would like to piggyback on a previous Ask Slashdot question. Do you know of any realistic way to use a tape drive solution at home, not as a backup, but as a regular NAS? I would like, for example, to save the torrents of my Linux distributions on it, and at the same time, play the family videos on a computer. It would seem at a first glance that the transfer rates and capacity of Linear Tape-Open (1.5TB, 280MB/s in 2010) and the functionality of LTFS would allow me to do that, but I don't know the details, or whether this would be economically viable."
you're not thinking this through, are you? it's a tape-drive...
No. Just no.
you'd need a cache drive in front of it.
the mb/s is ok yes, but that's for linear read/write from the tape.
"While specifications vary somewhat between different drives, a typical LTO-3 drive will have a maximum rewind time of about 80 seconds and an average access time (from beginning of tape) of about 50 seconds.[21][dead link] Note that due to the serpentine writing, rewinding often takes less time than the maximum."
the tape is also only good for 260 full passes.
just buy a hd based nas, archive to tape if you really archive that much stuff. but load it on hd first for gods sake.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
For playing a movie - maybe. For actually burning a torrent - fair enough... if that is the _only_ thing that happens.
The point is that multiple accesses is going to delay the drive by a huge amount. If you want to, say, copy that Linux iso to your NAS at the same time as someone is playing a movie, the tape drive is going to have to move between the locations of the two files, which is going to wreck the access times, as I stated. Torrents are worse: you're downloading from / uploading to a bunch of other computers, all wanting to read from or write to a different location in the file. Again, this means moving between locations and the resulting huge access times.
You may be able to alleviate the process by putting a SSD or HD as cache in between, but I'm not sure if there's off-the-shelf software to do that, and I'm not even sure if that's going to work comfortably. Besides, if you're going to put a SSD or HD in between, why not just use that?
1) Fast
2) Cheap
3) Large capacity.
Pick two.
No sig today...
"Written by someone with no grasp of technology"
Your comment written by someone with no grasp of the history of technology. There's folks reading your words who remember reading and storing files from cassette tapes in the 1980s. Like me.
"approved by someone with even less of a grasp on reality"
Story approved by someone with an appreciation that the geekiest novel solutions to problems are things unimaginative people would never consider seriously until forced to, because everyone else is enthusing about how cool it is. Let your mind wander into crazy scenarios and impossible what-ifs. Or butt out. Because some people come to Slashdot for exactly this talk on just this topic of the way-out-there.
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway." - Andrew Tanenbaum, 1996, Computer Network
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon ..."
And never underestimate the latency either.
I still use tapes today, and I think they would be nice for home use since I can pick up LTO-3 tapes for about $15 a pop, and LTO-5 tapes for around $42 each.
However, if one thinks a tape can be a random access device, they need to think again. Tapes are great for making sure data is copied somewhere safely, and once the read/write switch is flipped, that the data stays safe.
My recommendation: Keep the tape drive for backups, but go with two mirrored drives, or some other RAID configuration (other than RAID 0) to minimize the impact of a HDD failure.
for the love of god, buy a regular NAS
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