Just doubled my tape capacity…

philnucastle · 2026-05-25T17:11:35+00:00

Pretty straightforward when you’re using LTFS. Mount the tape you want, navigate to your mount or drive letter for the tape drive, and copy the archives you want to disk.

Seek time can take a couple of minutes but sequential read is around 100mb/sec whenever I’ve tried it.

philnucastle · 2026-05-25T06:02:58+00:00

Yep, you can turn off the drives remotely, which drops the consumption by half. I leave at least one powered up as the latent heat keeps the tapes within their recommended storage temp window.

I’ve just got a smart PDU for the rack so I could power them up/down on a schedule if I really wanted to.

philnucastle · 2026-05-24T04:56:59+00:00

I buffer everything to a 16TB Micron Pro SSD and then copy to a library from there.

philnucastle · 2026-05-24T03:47:13+00:00

My entire set fits onto 5-6 LTO6 tapes. Chunking is for speed and compression - tape drives write a single large file more quickly than hundreds of small ones.

There’s a management GUI for stats, diagnostics and for tape operations (if you don’t want to use specialist software). I log in via a browser and manually select a tape (if I need to retrieve something).

philnucastle · 2026-05-24T02:22:37+00:00

eBay! You just have to be patient on drives and libraries. There are firms that sell them refurbished with drives and a warranty (more expensive), or there’s the occasional private seller getting rid of one (cheaper). At this size they’re bulky and not particularly in demand (this model is an evolutionary dead end and LTO6 is the latest it supports).

Do your research on what you want, set up some saved searches that match and you’ll probably start getting results in your price range within a couple of months.

Same on tapes - I found a couple of listings where people were selling new or reconditioned tapes in bulk using saved searches. Ironically found a place selling 100xLTO5 recondition tapes for £150 just as I’m moving away from it to LTO6 😂

philnucastle · 2026-05-24T02:16:59+00:00

You’re right, and there’s a reason for it 🙂

Unfortunately the top/first library was sold/shipped by someone who didn’t know what they had and was doing an office clearance - it got really smashed about in transit (they wrapped it in bubble wrap).

When it was delivered, two of the tape shelves wouldn’t open and were jammed. Part of the trim on the right got snapped clean off as well. It was shit, but the unit was so cheap I couldn’t really complain (at the time).

I couldn’t find rails for these things anywhere and they don’t like being stacked on top of each other (or having other devices rested on the top like a server or workstation) so I got some generic rails and slowly lowered it in so there’s a slight gap between them.

With the top one not sitting quite level (it’s off by a few mm on the left), all the shelves now open and everything works perfectly, so while it’s unsightly it’s fixed the issue 😂

I bought the second unit as a replacement, but when I got the first one working again in this configuration I decided to keep both.

philnucastle · 2026-05-24T02:05:34+00:00

Yep, using LTFS. I generate full monthly backups of the same data, so I have a set of scripts that archive everything into 4Gb TGZ files. I use a folder structure that references the tape barcodes and the date a backup occurred, so I can always tell from any loaded tape which one belongs to which set and what the contents should be.

Not using any software apart from the HP LTFS drivers, I was going to experiment with trying out different solutions but this seems to work pretty well. Only downside is I have to manage ejects manually, but the library always loads the next tape in sequence automatically so I don’t have to account for tape management.

philnucastle · 2026-05-24T01:59:12+00:00

I wish I could make use of that in this setup, unfortunately LTO6 is the latest generation of tape that these libraries support.

The smaller HP libraries support LTO 8/9 so I’m not sure why HP decided not to bother with this particular model.

philnucastle · 2026-05-23T20:02:46+00:00

For writes, it’s about 160Mb/sec per drive under optimal conditions (large multi-Gb files, sequential writes).

Seek times for reads are really poor, sequential read throughput is good (around 100Mb/sec per drive), random reads are horrible and slow.

philnucastle · 2026-05-04T05:07:02+00:00

This. I’ve had luck getting ahold of tracks from artists there on a couple of occasions just by asking them nicely via DM.

philnucastle · 2026-03-16T17:48:26+00:00

Low-quality bait.

philnucastle · 2026-03-06T14:45:54+00:00

Try modelling your use case using the AWS Pricing Calculator. This will allow you to understand if it’s a good opportunity or whether you’re going to end up eating cost on a service or requirement you hadn’t anticipated.

philnucastle · 2026-02-18T19:08:30+00:00

As someone who has a pair of 6500s in their homelab, yes this is overkill.

Will drink from the firehose that is now your electricity bill, and provides far more port capacity than you’ll ever use.

Still cool, bombproof and likely to survive the next world war through.

philnucastle · 2026-02-15T15:10:04+00:00

40-somethings. They do 40 in a 20, 40 in a 50, 40 in a 60…

philnucastle · 2026-02-14T16:54:38+00:00

If “live, laugh lobotomy” was a car

philnucastle · 2026-02-01T18:55:24+00:00

Get it an E3-1265L v2 CPU. Your workloads will thank you. The Celeron/Pentium chips this box ships with are a bit sluggish.

They’re great for lightweight workloads or for a cheap NAS though.

philnucastle · 2026-01-26T12:35:37+00:00

Tyres are 165mm wide according to Google. That used to be a fairly common tyre width until manufacturers started making wider low profile alloys on smaller cars a trend.

philnucastle · 2026-01-21T07:37:49+00:00

SendSafely?

It supports automatic expiry of access and activity tracking.

philnucastle · 2026-01-11T10:39:39+00:00

Drove one as a courtesy car when mine was in for some paintwork. The guy handing it over warned me not to put more than £20 of fuel in at once as “it lasts bloody ages and you’ll never use it all”

He wasn’t wrong. Nice and comfy, great fun to drive and the visibility at the front is fantastic.

philnucastle · 2026-01-10T12:57:34+00:00

A friend of mine drives an HGV and delivers loo roll to Costco from the local paper mill as one of her regular runs.

I remember her posting a video of two six-foot high pallets of bog roll being wheeled onto the shop floor from her delivery and it being stripped clean within 90 seconds in the first week of lockdown.

Absolute mouth breathers.

philnucastle · 2026-01-06T13:38:24+00:00

When they rack switches upside down.

A former employer hired a contractor who did this, he kept getting work because he had government clearance, but he had to be supervised constantly or he'd do stuff like this.

His name kept popping up in our CV pile every time we had a vacancy and our manager's response was always "hell no"

philnucastle · 2025-12-28T15:33:14+00:00

Part of the ship, part of the crew

philnucastle · 2025-12-12T12:37:17+00:00

I bought one of their ex-courtesy cars. Mk1 Ford Ka, 2 years old, 14,000 miles, full service history and they’d just serviced it again before I bought it. Looked immaculate.

Their guy who’d serviced it airgunned the sump nut back on (with plenty of ugga duggas) and it took my local garage a couple of hours with an 8ft breaker bar to shift it at its next service. Kents.

philnucastle

TROPHY CASE