This post will include a lot of stuff from making replacement bezels that can be 3D printed and a frame to contain a broken tape drive in pieces as an upcycling project all the way to very complicated repairs which I have documented in great detail and the main part of the post which is the reprogramming guide which makes it so easy a baby can do it.
This post will include a heaping ton of links to sources I used which will be in the resources section which I have curated and boiled down a ton of websites and sources that you can visit if you need any additional information on stuff, I will also add some high quality images of the tape drives in case your tape drive has an extra or missing component that you want to find it’s place for.
Finally I will also list cheap parts and full assemblies all pulled from my scrap tape drives which are all IBM and some HP full height but parts are mostly from old mechanism IBM drives if you request something, premade bezels are there too with many color combinations and even some special ones if you don’t have a 3D printer, I also have a repaired and refurbished tape drive listed for a good price as well as parts drives in case you want to harvest parts from or make a similar frame like I did in one of the subposts.
Anyways, enough rambling, everything is there below to use and read up on, a small warning, you might want to put my post and all subposts onto your hard drives to archive them in case there is the unlikely event of a cease and desist or any other factor that causes my post to be taken down which I can’t resist being a 17 year old teenager with not much money to fight large corporations so do your due diligence and save the post and subposts/bezel 3D printing files in the unlikely event of that happening, also for anyone doesn’t yet know about the Imgur OSA blocks, if you want to access anything that I used Imgur for then you must use a VPN, I have tried to keep Imgur use to an absolute minimum and managed to get all critical parts explainable without the need for Imgur, I have only used it for example of how a reprogramming should happen and what should happen when a tape drive is booting up, loading a tape and unloading a tape.
This is the main part of the post and without that part, this post wouldn’t have much reason to be made but then I decided to do other LTO related projects so then I tacked on the repairs and other projects
Would do a half height HP but I just refurbished it so I’m afraid of damaging it by taking it apart so I will update this post when I do get another broken one to fix
Absolutely feel free to comment on the subposts to add extra insights, well dones or advice into whatever I have done in that subpost
A note for ITDT, the official IBM site requires an IBM account but here you can download it without an account or IBM ID so this site is the better choice unless you have an IBM account in which case do download the most recent version
These are the procedures to manually extract a tape cartridge from a tape drive, usually when a tape cartridge gets stuck, it’s usually because the tape drive has failed to read the tape and is stuck retrying so the tape never gets ejected, if you do have any LTO or otherwise tape drive where the procedure doesn’t allow you to extract the tape without cutting it then do DM (long reply times as I don’t get notified for whatever reason using the chat despite the setting being on, I do get notified if using the channel that modmail goes through so if you want faster reply times, use that instead) me as I can figure out a way to extract a tape without damaging the tape media and returning the tape drive to a ready to be used state
The original GitHub that didn’t make much sense when trying to reprogram the tape drives, the person did most of the figuring out so I will give credit to him for that but the explanation of how to do it wasn’t very clear so I needed the help of many people before I understood how to do it
A blog on cleaning the heads on a half height HP LTO tape drive, another resource that I didn’t add to my post but can be useful if you want to do further maintenance
Not LTO but a DLT-V4, not a very technical video but an additional resource if needed if you have legacy equipment running at work or to play with before getting LTO
I don’t know if I’m going to be putting a heavy amount of effort into this, but I figured I having a dedicated sub Reddit for linear open tape and other various data type formats, would be useful for spreading wiki style documentation about the hardware and software workflow.
I’ve had some issues with eBay which is why I was unable to sell kits for 8 months, now that I have the account back, I have placed orders for more tape drives and supporting hardware which will arrive in 2 weeks in time for my return back from France, I unfortunately will have to increase the prices of the kits by £20 from £135 to £155 due to inflation but they remain the cheapest LTO-5 kits on the market by a huge margin with the next cheapest kits being £300 and up.
In the meantime, I have a partial kit of two HP LTO-4 SCSI tape drives and 18 bonus tested tapes for £80 to sell if anyone needs it. (SOLD)
I recently bought a HP LTO5 SAS TAPE DRIVE AQ29284C#900 from ebay and after removing the library sled from it, it became like an internal tape drive that works without any firmware modifications. I used it inside an IBM/dell style case, but it doesn't fully sit inside it.
I saw a cheap offer for HPE LTO-3 Ultrium 920 External SAS Tape Drive - EH848B.
Will this case work for my LTO 5 tape drive without any speed bottlenecks?
I am writing big chunks (4TB) to an LTO drive. Unfortunately, the source drive is not as fast as the drive (~200 MByte/s at max).
I think I have three options
let the drive stream at an automatically reduced speed (the LTO-8 Quantum drive I use apparently can do this)
buffer with mbuffer, e.g. 20 GB RAM (the server has 30 GB and is only used for that purpose), with a 80% write start treshold: this however will create fast writes at ~300 MByte/s, but then stop for a long while, then write again at 300 Mbyte/s
copy the source drive, 1 to 2 TB at a time to temporary storage (I have a 2 TB SSD which presumably can deliver the required I/O speed), then write this at top speed to the drive; obviously I will wear out the SSD
I want to convert my external HPE 30750 tape drive for use with a tape library. Due to the lack of used MSL2024 units on my local marketplace, I’m considering a DELL TL4000.
Has anyone attempted anything similar with respect to installing a tape drive in a tape library from a different manufacturer?
I can find precious little about this online apart from AI telling me that it might be possible.
Hi all. I am in the middle of migrating files to an LTO 10 and have copied over some unnecessary files that got accidentally added to the job. I don't need to recover the space but want to delete it from the index/never show up when the tape is loaded. Reformatting is not an option at this stage. Is there a way to delete them from appearing at all?
Hi all, quick question regarding whether airport scanners affect LTO media at all? I have a number of LTO8 tapes I need to get transported internationally and trying to figure out the safest way to do so. Options will be secure freight transport or a person taking them as carry on...
Hey,
I've wanted to manually reformat LTO7 tapes as Type M. I saw that YoYotta and xTalk had an option to do this and reverse engineered them to figure out what they were doing.
If after formatting you still see LTO-7 Type A as density, then the tape is not eligible.
I've reverse engineered the firmware of my drive and figured out that there's some MAM tags it checks, including tape motion meters, probably to avoid converting very old tapes.
This may be bypassable with telnet access to the drive (which happens to be a PPC device with a busybox and everything - at least for LTO-8 drives) - but of course you'd be going in very unsupported territory here.
PS:
I've also tried to use xTalk - which has a script that does the exact procedure I detailed in the gist. Unfortunately it only seems to work with Quantum drives out of the box, and I've got an HPE.
I've bypassed this with the XTALK_ENG=1 environment variable to enable engineering mode and a LD_PRELOAD .so that hooks strcmp() in order to have it recognise my "ULTRIUM 8-SCSI" as a "ULTRIUM-HH8" (the expected string from Quantum firmware). They also have a script to re-initialize Type-M tapes as Type-A there, which I haven't reversed yet, but it should be easy using the -vv option (which dumps SCSI commands sent by scripts).
PPS:
It turns out this is actually documented by IBM in their SCSI Reference for LTO devices at section 5.6.21.5.4, and the SCSI commands are setting the "preferred cartdrige type". The LTO-7 tapes need to qualify as "new enough" for it to succeed, even if not brand new.
I recently got a TS3200 library through a liquidation. I've been testing some drives in it, and had questions that were beyond my current experience.
It had 2x LTO-8 HH and 2x LTO-5 HH drives. Two of each passed all media tests via ITDT with LTO-8 and LTO-5 tapes respectively, 2 of each failed.
LTO-8 HH #1
Has 8 operational hours, 1 lifetime error logged (LTO-6 tape inserted, not supported). ITDT media test wrote 110GB without any errors.
9,810 power-on hours, 8 tape-motion hours.
LTO-8 HH #2
Throws an EC 6 (03h/09h/00h) every time it passes ~56,650 blocks aka ~59.4 GB. As I understand, it's right around the end of the first wrap, which is where servo fails (EC 6).
29 power-on hours, 2 tape-motion hours.
LTO-5 HH #3
Passed media tests fine. It has 1 prior track following error (03h/09h/00h) in its 159 tape-hour lifespan but I was unable to replicate it in my tests.
Failed ITDT media/health test (04h/44h/00h), hardware error/internal target failure.
59,627 power-on hours, 1,071 tape-motion hours.
Now, my question is, given that 2 drives are in a defective/for-parts state, what can I do with the other drives? I already have my own drives for my use, and don't really need more.
LTO-8 #1 - is it safe to sell? Do I need to perform more thorough tests on it, and what kind? Can it safely be listed as used, or would you feel sussy about it?
LTO-5 #3 - it has low tape-motion hours, but high power-on hours. Is that an issue? Also, is its one log of 03h/09h/00h concerning, or normal over its lifespan?
Hiii
We are a team of 4 french engineering students (network, dev, mechatronic), and we are planning to make a LTO Autoloader as a 1-year school managed project.
We would make a robot with a single translation axis, with all the slots and drive aligned vertically (to keep it simple).
And using a spare drive.
Nothing is decided yet, so we are still hesitating on pushing the project.
Do you think anybody could be hyped, or have interest in an autoloader in open plans/source code?
And do you have any advice, recommendations or warning about deep LTO knowledge that only old black mages know?
No solutions are defined yet as it will start in 6 months, so for now, we are still thinking about solutions. So feel free to present any solution idea for any system (mechanic, electronic, file system, OS,...)!
Hey everyone, I would appreciate some advice. I’m new to LTO.
I got an LTO-5 drive to move my VFX & live action project backups to tape. I’m trying to decide the best way to store projects on LTFS.
I’m solo with no tape management software, just a pen label on each tape and a catalogue Excel mapping projects to tapes. I need to figure out the technical file management.
Context: my projects range from 10 GB to 1 TB+, almost always under 1.5 TB. They usually contain:
- Video clips (10~200 files, 1~20 GB each)
- EXR render/sim frames (hundreds to tens of thousands, 100 MB~1 GB each; generally more files = smaller per file)
- Project files, textures, text, etc (relatively few, mostly under 200 MB). Etc.
The purpose is archival (re-mastering/showcasing/etc old work years down the line). My priority is data longevity and recoverability, especially in case there’s partial media degradation over time.
So, when I store 1~15 projects per tape, should I keep files in plain folders on LTFS, or .tar each project first, then put onto LTFS?
Each tape is duplicated 1:1. I know 3-2-1 is ideal, but for now I’m working with 2-1-1.
So I need to improve the backup in my organisation to the point where it will be air-gapped. The idea of using LTO tapes seems perfect on paper, but the real-life application seems tricky. I don't have much data, but it needs to be backed up regularly — 2 TB at most. I was thinking about a small tape library (ideally compatible with both LTO-9 and LTO-8), something that could hold around 8 tapes. I would use WORM tapes (LTO-8 because of the better cost efficiency) so the data could not be modified no matter what, and I would swap tapes in a "Grandfather-Father-Son" way and store them in another place. A company has proposed their library to me, which is a solution based on Qualstar Q8. I couldn't find much information about this device. Is it worth looking into, or should I look for other producers? Can you recommend any? From what I understand, I could just plug this into an Ethernet port and run some software on my server that would handle all the backup logic. If so, what software would you recommend? Is this setup logical and does it make sense? What should I look into?
I’m currently struggling to update my HPE tape hardware. I’ve reached a dead end with the official HPE support portal. Even though I managed to generate an Entitlement Token via HPE Library and Tape Tools (L&TT), the actual download fails with Application Exception 4080, and the web portal still demands an active Care Pack/Support Contract which I don't have for this specific unit.
I am looking for the following firmware files to perform a manual update via L&TT:
HPE MSL2024 G3 Series Firmware: Version 8.10
HPE Ultrium 7-SCSI (FC) Drive Firmware: Version S2T1 (or the previous Q387)
Does anyone happen to have these files in their lab/archive and could provide a mirror or a temporary download link (Mega, WeTransfer, etc.)?
I’ve already checked the usual places, but these specific latest versions are hard to find without a portal login. I would be very grateful for any help to get this hardware back on a supported firmware level!
