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."

Comments

Re:Nope.

[DeathToBill]

I'm not sure you've got the point. Images of Linux distros are big, contiguous files that you want to access rarely and read linearly - probably just the thing to go on tape. To a certain degree, video is the same - one big file that you want to read linearly.

Of course, the practicalities might not be so great. If you want to share the torrent back with the community, then that's a problem. So is wanting to skip around in a video.

But I don't think the question is quite as insane as you make out.