>>34958127 (OP)
Alright, I'm listening.

My NAS is up to 9TB, how much would it cost to run it off of tape drives instead, and how much speed would I get?

Tape is removable media right? Is it even a good idea for it to sit in drive all day every day? Can I saturate a 10/100 LAN? Can I RAID0 to get up to 10/100 saturation?

>>34958597
>Can I saturate 10/100 LAN?
Not even close.
The advantage of tape drives is large-scale hoarding, not using the NAS like an extra HDD.

I don't think you would realistically see many (or any) benefits at 9TB.

>>34958597

How much does 9TB cost you? I wish I had even 10% of that space.

How stable are these? I want to set up some heavy duty hoarding but I want my shit to be safe. Does this corrupt over time like cd rot?

>>34958698
The main reason these are popular is for backup.

They're literally the most stable form of media available.

>>34958127 (OP)
>looks
>6tb tape is 90$

hrm im interested...

What are you doing on /g/ if you have never heard about tape drives?

6.25TB? Impressive, I remember that my Atari XL was able to save around ~1MB to 90m tape.

>>34958771
You still need a device to write and read to the tape.

>>34958694
About $400 in todays dollars, but it's actually 1 3tb - $150, 2x2tb - 2x$150, 1x1tb - ???, 1-640gb - ???. Bought at different times so the prices are a bit random and not sure how much the two smallest drives were. Drives aren't very expensive - wish I had a good raid controller on that mobo but it's really old... Would really love to move over to 6x3tb RAID6 on this other mobo, but then I need new hardware...

>>34958659
>>34958708
So, RAID1 with the mirrors on tape, make daily backups? Legit plan?

>>34958127 (OP)
>There's no need to rewrite data
But there is.

My NAS has 4TBs, I don't use all of it and I horde information for apocalyptic reasons.

>>34958802
What need is that?
All you're doing is accessing the data.
When storage space is this cheap, there's really no reason to make that horrible decision to delete Stargate SG-1 in order to make room for Game of Thrones.

>>34958817
If you used tapes, you could literally download Wikipedia.

Not just the pages, you could download EVERYTHING.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download#English-language_Wikipedia

Just think about that for a moment.

How long does it take to read 6TB of data? One file could be at one end, and another can be at the very last. Wouldn't it take a long time if they are seeding?

>>34958906
That's why tapes are for backup, not for typical usage.

>>34958867
>6GBs for all the English articles
Downloading now, thanks.

But a tape drive reader/writer is 1000s of $

>>34958802
But anon, it clearly says "RW" on the package!

>>34958867

>Not just the pages, you could download EVERYTHING.

Images too?

>>34958994
> EVERYTHING
> Images too?

Uh...

>>34958819
Maybe I'm autistic and decide that I want to rename files or rearrange directory structures.

>>34958867
And it would take god damn forever to pull up a specific page because their random read speed is dismal. No thanks, I'll stick to my 9 TB RAID that cost me $400.

I figured as much, would these only be supported on Linux, BSD, or UNIX like OSes?
The tape drive readers I mean?

>>34958127 (OP)
>Why don't people use tape drives for NAS/torrentboxes?
Why do you think you stupid piece of shit?

They're for archival, not playback or real-time storage. Why are you so fucking stupid?

>>34959016
store directory hierarchy on a different storage medium and use hard links to the tape locations? Come on, it's not hard.

I know Windows has icons for tape drives but I've never actually seen a Windows machine with a tape drive.

>>34959019
It actually depends exactly whose tapes you're using. They all use slightly different variations on the filesystems in use (mostly LTFS these days) and it's up to them to provide support for the OS. Windows support is pretty widespread, at least for windows server, because windows dominates the server market just like it does the desktop market.

>>34959045
I still wouldn't want to go through the trouble to learn that.

>>34959094
>windows dominates the server market
kek

>>34959105
ie ie, this is basic linoox. If you don't want to do that much then probably shouldn't bother with tapes at all.

>>34959144
You're right, I wouldn't. Too much trouble for some savings.

I don't know why but my quote link didn't go through. >>34959054 was meant for >>34959019

>>34958127 (OP)
>Why don't people use tape drives for NAS/torrentboxes?

1) Initial cost. Tapes themselves are cheap, tape decks are not. The cheapest HP tape drive i can find is close to £600. You've got to be doing a _lot_ of storage to make that worthwhile over just buying a load of new disks.

2) Access times. Tape has two modes. Slow and slower. It's designed to be filled with data and then only used as a last resort, and the typical use-case is just pulling everything off the tape in sequence. Accessing files in real time? Forget about it. Most tapes don't even have a filesystem, they literally just record data. Even if you do have LTFS, it's just a hacked on solution - all changes are appended to the end of the tape and an entry added to an xml table describing the change. They are as-good-as read only. Using one inside a live operating system, with all the background moving and shuffling that implies, is not going to be a pleasant experience.

>>34959133
>kek
no but seriously it does. linux runs the web and hpc. business runs on windows.

>>34959182
Well the thing is, if you can just buy more storage cheap, why would you want to get rid of stuff when it comes to TV/movies, etc? Sequential access and read-only aren't very big drawbacks when you just want to watch videos.

>>34959054
We had a few older servers with them built in (big-ass towers) but generally just used the rack mount drive in the rack.

The writers for these are way too expensive.

I'll stick to my plan of writing my everything on bluray, twice, to store my 93 TB of media files.

>>34959054
Government Edge DC's.

>>34959252
It's not about getting rid of things.
It's about simply getting the files off.

You don't get to just browse it like a drive and pull off files

>>34959272
How do you hoard so much data?

>>34959272
Enjoy writing 7440 bluray discs over the course of 4 months (if you babysit the drive 24/7).

>>34959272
>93 TB
Spread over how many drives?

>>34959252
>Well the thing is, if you can just buy more storage cheap, why would you want to get rid of stuff when it comes to TV/movies, etc?

You wouldn't, but I don't get rid of anything now anyway. HDD storage is cheap *enough*. Think like an engineer - you want cheap enough, not cheapest.

Anyway, it's not cheaper at all until you get into the dozens of terabytes of storage. That is a _lot_ of storage.

>Sequential access and read-only aren't very big drawbacks when you just want to watch videos.
Ok, maybe if you live alone with your single battlestation and your windows taped up, but my media lives on a microserver under the stairs and is open to every one of the many, many smart devices in the house. Phones, tablets, laptops, Raspis, smart TVs, sound systems, they all access the media. Linear access suddenly falls apart when you want to do more than one thing at a time.

Remember you are limited to doing _exactly_ one thing, and that thing must be linear in nature.

>>34959319
You already know what is there though. Is it impossible to maintain a file pointer table off the tape-drive? Sure the seek delay sucks, but the rest of the downfalls are so damn trivial!

>>34958127 (OP)
I made a long thread about this a while back

everyone ended up agreeing that the only way to bargain this is to buy a certain type of tapes that is outdated and isn't extremely expensive, because the newer and higher compressable tape drives are extremely expensive, same goes with the tapes.

plus its loud as fuck

>>34959354
At that point, it is more efficient to use a regular drive.

You use the right tool for the job. Sure you can use a wrench to pound a nail, but a hamer is going to be a far better experience for you

I have 5 8Gb stt2800n drives if anyone wants.

>>34959428
But you still have a higher data density and lower cost if you just put a file pointer table on a regular HDD.

i would, but tape drives are really fucking expensive

>>34959324
>>34959336
>>34959338
My father works in the movies industry, having all the storage he can use. I have all my data since the napster times (i didn't use it, my first was usernet and emule). Lot's of movies, and lots of music. For movies i have a .txt with the names so I know what did I downloaded, what I didn't.

My current library has about 50.000 movies, sitting on his companies file servers. A home nas with 8 Tb for short term storage (and file transfer for the servers). I have literally every single file that I've downloaded in the past 15 years. (more than 80% of those are bad quality 480p rips)

The thing is, he won't be there forever, so I need a plan for taking that data out in the next 5 years or so.

>>34959531
*stt28000n

A while ago I scored an Ultrium 5 deck with a 16 cassette autoloader for $400 from a real estate business that went under. Nobody knew what the fuck half the tech shit was, so the deck, autoloader and 20 3tb cartridges came home with me for a grand total of $500. Best investment I've ever made. I have it rigged to do a partial rsync backup of all my shit every 24 hours, and a full backup weekly. After the initial full backup, the backups take maybe 20 minutes a day. It reads at about 120mb/s, so about the same as a WD Green/other 5400rpm drive. But since it's tape the seek times are fucking horrendous.

Because they are tapes and they read and write on a magnetic freaking strip...
not the most durable or reliable material.

>>34959543
You seem to have sidestepped the fact that it takes 4 god damn months of 24/7 bluray burning and over 7000 discs to do what you claim to be doing.

>>34959574
Nice.

>>34959590
what?

>>34959579

not to mention the speed will never outpace something like a SSD or a bybrid HDD/SSD

>>34959543
If anybody has good suggestions, I'm up to it.

>>34959336
>(if you babysit the drive 24/7)
I've tested this idea, to queue 6-10 disks worth of data, so I only need to change the disk. I've also considered buying one of those duplicator thigs, 10 drives burning at the same time, and sell the drives afterwards.

>>34959579
>durable
It's THE most durable storage media currently being used (blabla stones and paper, no shit, asshole).

Also, it's for LONG TERM STORAGE, nothing else.

>>34958966
>>34958966
>>34958966
>>34958966

>>34959615
lol wtf? it won't even outpace HDDs
Why would you even say that?

What kind of speeds can tape operate at?

>>34959700
About the same as a 5400RPM hd, but with fucking HORRENDOUS access times. Best to do huge dumps at once.

>>34959700
throughput is generally pretty decent, but access time is slow as balls (seconds to minutes between random accesses)

they're best used for linear read/writing (such as mass backups/restores)

>>34959617
I'm sure you could set it up so you only have to change the disc, yeah. You still have to physically come back to your computer every ~23 minutes to swap it.

Let's say you treat it like a full time job, you spend 40 hours a week just burning discs. It'll take you 72 solid weeks to burn two copies of your 93 TB to 7440 25 GB Bluray discs.

>>34959736
I don't fucking know what else to do.

I've considered cloud, but man, it would cost thousands of moneys.

>>34959736
What is CD stack?
What is multiple drives?

>>34959736
are you assuming he'd only use a single burner? because that'd be silly, mass disc burning is never done one a time

What the hell do people even use NAS drives with like 10tb for anyway?
What do you put on it to even come close to more than 2tb

>>34959791
They keep literally everything that they've ever downloaded.

>>34959791
Lemme put it to you this way : I'm not a particularly bad hoarder. Compared to some people I've met, I'm downright sane.

My movie collection is 36TB.

Why don't people use tape for live data?

Because tape sucks for that.

To retrieve a specific file would require you to insert the correct tape, spool it to the appropriate point (which can take ages) and then try and read it.

Also, everytime you do this you're both abrading and stretching the tape. You can only do this a number of times before you'll get dataloss. Which means that you need to have a copy stored somewhere....

>>34959791
http://publichd.org/index.php?page=torrent-details&id=2a076d6cefd750fa9a29745cc956f631153b5fd5

And so on.

>>34959773
Optical discs go bad.
There is a good chance a significant chunk of those will not work after a decade.

>>34959773
>I don't fucking know what else to do.

Deal with your hoarding problem.

>>34959823
Jesus. I struggle with filling 2TB with films and the like

>>34959826
>Insert a tape
Mechatronics engineering master race reporting in.
I'd just make a system to automate it.

>>34959791
the amount of things i have isn't all that big, it's just that i don't settle for low quality media, so a moderate amount of high quality media adds up very quickly

i have 6T of stuff

>>34959846
FIOS. 300down fills disks FAST.

>>34959700
About 500MB/Hr if you can keep it fed with data. If you can't keep it's buffers full then that plummets as it's stop/starting. The odds of failed writes and damaged tapes also increases substantially.

The big thing to remember with tapes is that they're incredibly fragile. The ideal use scenario is that you write a backup, read it back to verify it and then put it in a box. If you dick about appending stuff, reading files off, etc. then the tape will be toast really fast.

If you've got 10TB+ of NAS then it's a great backup but it can never be a replacement.

>>34959736
Second hand tape library. Look for an HP 1/8 or MSL2024.

>>34959894
When your connection is that fast there is no reason to horde media. If you aren't watching it then don't download it.

>>34959834
The solution I was given is to buy bulk 3/4 TB drives, this would cost something between 3 and 5 thousand dolars, depending on the price.

AND, every 3/4 years, conect them to load and unload everything, like remove all data from the drive, full format again, and then write it back.

I'm still wondering, I need to start in the next year or so.

>>34959855
>>Insert a tape
>Mechatronics engineering master race reporting in.
>I'd just make a system to automate it.
Because it's not like you can't just buy that off the shelf?

>>34959945
Point taken, but buying things is terrifying while making things is fun as fuck.

>>34959933
That's nice and all, but often it's really hard to get streams of certain older stuff, and if you don't download it straight away then it's hard to get enough seeds or non-broken links. Hell, half my favourites list on Youtube are just dead links, entire playlists are dead. Steaming is awesome and I stream things all the time, but there's a lot of stuff I'd like to keep.

http://publichd.org/index.php?page=torrents&active=0&order=4&by=2

I have 13 torrents from this page. Fuck me.

>>34959937
Why do you need to keep everything you've downloaded?

>>34959933
Great if you pay for netflix/etc. All my shit comes from torrents, and if you download it, you might as well keep it. My tower holds 10tb. My tape library holds 48tb. If I haven't watched something in a couple months, it gets archived to tape.

I also work with COLOSSAL LIDAR datasets pretty routinely. Having retarded amounts of storage handy is part of the job.

>>34960001
I like to think that someday it will be relevant somehow.
I have rare 30's 40's movies that where ripped by their original studio, tell me that isn't worth it.

>>34960041
That is cool. But what about all the other stuff?

Would the studios not have kept the rips themselves (a copy of them)?

>>34960041
This. A good portion of my collection are actual film transfers swiped from the my old university's library (Thank you, based dorm network). A lot of that old film is nitrocellulose and if there's a fire, FOOF! I now have the only surviving copy.

>>34960083
Very often, no.
The BBC for example has a good habit of destroying tapes.
We've lost a lot of great film because of them.

>>34958694
You don't have 900 GB? I was mortified when I went from 5.5 TB to 5 in a hard drive crash.

>>34960026
>58tb
If... if the apocalypse happens can I come to your house?

>>34960152
Hey mate, come to mine.
I totally won't kill you, eat you and take your supplies.
Nope, it's a massive party and everyone's invited.

>>34960102
If you swiped them from the network then they must already have been digitised? Or am I missing something? So someone else must've had the file?

If all you did was copy a file then someone else probably has it.

>>34960126
The BBC destroyed tapes before they were able to be digitised. If a studio goes to the trouble of digitising an old film why would they not keep a copy of the file?

>>34960219
Because they didn't heed OP's advice and they used HDD NAS boxes?

>>34960083
Yes, they would, but I can't knock on sony pictures/20th Century Fox and say "hey, I would like to watch [...]". Also, >>34960126 There is a torrent going around with the only copies of rare shit from bbc and cartoon, they lost everything in a arson.

Many studios buy old salt mines to keep their tapes. But shit happens.

Many movies come from my dad's access to private data, studios are scumbags, if it doesn't make profit, it needs to go. I bet somewhere a poor dude where ordered to overwrite important old movies to make room for new shit.

>>34959617
>If anybody has good suggestions, I'm up to it.
Get 20TB in a Linux box, using HDD on RAID6 or such.

A gaming mainboard and a sata controller in a suitable case will get you there easily.

Copy the stuff you know you like most into a dedicated section, be it a folder or a different partition.

Then start copying over the bulk of files. Write a batch script to delete files below a certain quality threshold.. the stuff you'd cringe at watching again at that quality anyhow. And also run deduplication software on it all.

Shouldn't be a problem to save all you care about that way.

File: 1372608772139.png-(115 KB, 761x643, a.png)

115 KB PNG

>>34959991

I lost 1TB of data from a crash and felt like shit for the rest of the week. My internet connection is so slow, it would take nearly a year to download all of that again, not counting the shitty data caps.

>>34958127 (OP)
What drive are you using? After looking around a bit all im seeing is really expensive ones. 1000+usd

>>34960450
drive != tape cartridge

>>34960380
You can also use a gaming-tier computer or such to re-encode videos in x264 and stuff like that. Also with a script.

There's an additional quality loss for reencoding things that were in divx and shit as x264 again, but the space savings are more than enough to make it interesting enough for the things that are *not* amongst your favourites.

>>34960262
>ordered to overwrite important old movies to make room for new shit.

I dunno. Storage is cheap (when you're that big). I almost think it would be cheaper to just keep growing the storage pool (which they're probably doing anyway) than to hire a dude to find a delete something.

>I can't knock on sony pictures/20th Century Fox and say "hey, I would like to watch [...]".

But do you need to watch what I assume is a raw rip? Why not let them keep the raw and just save a high quality but compressed copy for yourself? How likely is it you're going to want to watch a film that has seen no digital release, especially when we're producing content at such a high rate that you can't consume everything made in a year?

>>34960502
>But do you need to watch what I assume is a raw rip? Why not let them keep the raw and just save a high quality but compressed copy for yourself?
We also got some nicer algorithms for losslessly encoding data that can work on today's computers. Flac for audio, Huffyuv / Schroedinger / lossless h264 for Video... or PAQ, if you're *really* not in a hurry.

>>34960566
I didn't said anything about raw. I don't even have anything raw. I'm already saving that high quality rip.

>>34960726
Older encodings still sucked in terms of space - to - quality ratio, as compared to newer ones.

>>34960219
Yah, they'd already been scanned in. A lot of it is REAL old shit like Casablanca and Lawrence of Arabia stored as BD quality HD rips.

>>34960849
Just realized I didn't really answer your question. The Uni's copies are all on spinnin platters. Mine are on Ultrium, and they get stored in a fire safe when not in use. TL;DR mine are almost guaranteed to last longer than theirs.

>>34960886
They don't have an offsite tape backup or anything? That seems like poor planning.

>>34960924
LOL dude, this is in my house. Like within arm's reach. I have been considering renting a safe deposit box though...

>>34958127 (OP)
it's the price.

http://www.newegg.com/Backup-Drives/SubCategory/ID-46/Page-2?Order=PRICE

>>34960484
I know, but to use the cart you need a drive don't you? Or does the cart connect through usb?