{"id":235,"date":"2009-03-14T07:26:16","date_gmt":"2009-03-13T20:26:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nsrd.wordpress.com\/?p=235"},"modified":"2009-03-14T07:26:16","modified_gmt":"2009-03-13T20:26:16","slug":"is-your-lto-media-compatible-with-your-drives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/2009\/03\/14\/is-your-lto-media-compatible-with-your-drives\/","title":{"rendered":"Is your LTO media compatible with your drives?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>or, not all LTO media is created equal.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s an assumption that because LTO is a standard shared by multiple vendors, then any Ultrium media can be used in any Ultrium drives. (NB: Of course I&#8217;m referring here to the same version &#8211; i.e., version 4 media in a version 4 drive, or version 3 media in a version 3 drive, etc.*)<\/p>\n<p>While <em>technically<\/em> this should be true, in practice it usually isn&#8217;t. I don&#8217;t wish to name vendors here, but suffice to say that I&#8217;ve had real-world experience, both in implementation and support scenarios, where tape drives have come from vendor A, but media was purchased from vendor B due to cheaper prices, and there&#8217;s been no end of &#8220;fun&#8221;. (That&#8217;s for very small values of &#8220;fun&#8221;, as a one-time colleague of mine used to say.)<\/p>\n<p>When this has happened it&#8217;s usually manifested in one of a few different ways:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Excessive numbers of media failures \u2013 e.g., hard errors.<\/li>\n<li>High numbers of tapes filling before they should \u2013 e.g., a 400GB tape filling at 300GB, 250GB, etc.<\/li>\n<li>Significant slow-downs accompanied by SCSI warnings.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>In such cases after all other possibilities have been eliminated \u2013 hardware, software, firmware, operational handling, etc. \u2013 these sorts of problems have been eliminated by changing media. I should note that in such situations, I&#8217;ve had customers actually send their media back to whom they purchased it from, who tested it, and certified it as being 100% OK. OK in different drives, that is.<\/p>\n<p>This is not a posting recommending that you always buy media from whatever vendor your tape drives came from. I would however suggest the following:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Media that comes from the same manufacturer as your tape drive vendor will be OK.<\/li>\n<li>Media that comes from reputable media vendors that <em>don&#8217;t<\/em> make competing tape drives should also be OK.<\/li>\n<li>If one vendor&#8217;s media is\u00a0ridiculously\u00a0cheap &#8211; e.g., half the price from one vendor than it is from all others, then maybe you should exercise caution before committing your backups to it.<\/li>\n<li>Any decent media supplier will be able to tell you which media is recommended for use with a particular vendors&#8217; tape drives.<\/li>\n<li>Most hardware vendors do actually, if you look closely enough, recommend particular media vendors. This will undoubtedly include their own, but it usually includes 2 or 3 others. You should trust that information.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&#8212;<br \/>\n* I haven&#8217;t forgotten about backwards compatibility of media \u2013 e.g., any LTO-x drive must be able to read x-2 media and write x-1 media in addition to x media.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>or, not all LTO media is created equal. 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