Tandberg Data LTO-4 Drive

I recently acquired a Tandberg Data LTO-4 drive and am using it for archiving purposes. I also looked at the Quantum and HP offerings. The HP we 60% more expensive for what looks to be the same specs as the Quantum and Tanberg products. The Quantum was out of stock so the Tandberg became the default selection.

It's a half height drive in an external enclosure. Anyone hoping for USB, Firewire or eSata is going to be very disappointed. These things are all SCSI or SAS. I opted for SAS due to easier configuration (pretty much plug & play) and over time SAS is replacing SCSI at all levels anyway, just like SATA replaced EIDE.

I have to say that the fan in this thing is pretty noisy, so much so that I tend to do most of my archiving over night because it's loud enough to be distracting - especially if I'm trying to edit to sound at the same time.

Backup speeds are pretty much as expected. From my internal SATA RAID I'm seeing 120MB/s. From another internal (non RAID) SATA drive I'm seeing about 65MB/s average (inc smaller files - which always slows things down). From my external Drobo S (connected via eSata) I'm seeing about 45MB/s and from an external Firewire drive about 40MB/s. So, clearly the internal SATA RAID is showing it's worth here.

The tapes are reasonably compact and hold 800GB native and 1.6TB compressed. Since video is already highly compressed you get no extra space at all. The software I'm using also adds more ECC than other software, so it can recover stuff from tapes that others may fail to read after a few years. With this in mind I'm seeing about 685GB of raw video streams per tape. For other backups (e.g. personal data, programs etc) I've seen about 1.4TB on a single tape.

Tapes can be spanned as well, so there is no effective upper limit. The software simply prompts you to change tapes and takes off with the new one.

Restoring from the tapes is simple (I did lots of testing before I started archiving for real), and there is a utility to scan the tapes for content incase your archive database gets lost.

Other than the noise this thing makes, it's a great solution for archiving lots of data (as opposed to short terms backups on HDDs). I've got some projects on the go that will take a couple of years to complete and as much as HDDs are easier, I've had too many die over the years after being sat on the shelf for just a few months. So for me, tape was the only reasonable solution for multi terabyte archiving.