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Tape Library recommendation OTHER than Tandberg?


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We had old Exabyte tape libraries. They kept dying. Now we have Tandberg.

 

Magnum 224 is what we're using now. We've bought at least three of them. One one is still working.

 

Every library keeps busting. We've spent thousands on these things, and the support contracts are something like $1600/year each. They break more than I'd like, and support hasn't been the greatest. Failed power supply, failed drive, failed library. The latest issues is that the robot can't identify tapes any more. It says all labels are invalid, it keeps suffering from read errors, it hangs when trying to move tapes, etc.

 

It's been a week, and I'm still waiting to hear back from Tandberg. I just gave them another $1600, and this is the "support" we get. We're a non-profit, so paying some company $1600-$3200 a year to not help us stings a little. With the latest scenario, no one has been here to take a look at the library, but they mailed us another tape drive for it.

 

We have hundreds of terabytes of data backed up to tape, so I don't want to move to a HDD-based backup, yet. I'm fine with tapes.

 

Does someone have a recommended tape library?

 

Our existing setup:

 

2U rackmount

24 tapes

LTO-4 drive

fiber channel connection

 

I'd like to stick with something like that.

 

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  • 2 years later...

I had the same issues with a SpectraLogic T50e running two LTO4 drives. It would hang, lose all libraries, pick a tape and then just stall etc. In the end, both drives died and I pulled it apart to find the robotic tracking had also snapped - no wonder the thing didn't know what to do haha! 

 

I'm now thinking along the lines of an Overland Neo SAS connected. These are either 12/24 slot and you can grow the library buying in another loader if required. ~£2800 buys you a 24 slot version with a single LTO6 drive. That's pretty good.

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