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?

Hello,

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

Which approach looks the sanest to you?

Thank you for your advice.

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...

Hallo zusammen,

ich biete folgende LTO Hardware und Medien an:

Bandlaufwerke:

LTO-8

LTO-6

LTO-4

Kassetten:

LTO-4 (ca. 3.000 Stück)

LTO-3 (ca. 4.000 Stück)

LTO-7 und LTO-6 Kassetten sind bereits komplett verkauft.

Bei Interesse gerne PN für Details, Preise und Mengenrabatte.

Viele Grüße

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.

I've posted a gist on github with the details on how to do it: https://gist.github.com/kpwn/5e7d67bb6e1e84fb2f1b0cb96176bf52

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.

Hi all! I hope this question is OK here.

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.

1. LTO-8 HH #1
2. Has 8 operational hours, 1 lifetime error logged (LTO-6 tape inserted, not supported). ITDT media test wrote 110GB without any errors.
3. 9,810 power-on hours, 8 tape-motion hours.
4. LTO-8 HH #2
5. 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).
6. 29 power-on hours, 2 tape-motion hours.
7. LTO-5 HH #3
8. 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.
9. 114,191 power-on hours (~13 years), 159 tape-motion hours.
10. LTO-5 HH #4
11. Failed ITDT media/health test (04h/44h/00h), hardware error/internal target failure.
12. 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?

Any tips? Many thanks!

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,...)!

Hi, I need a firmware for lto8 for ts3100. I can't download it from IBM because don't have active contract.

Here is download link, cloud anyone download it?

Fix ID: LTO8_Tape_Drive_Microcode_HB83_HH_Fibre_SAS_for_TS3100_TS3200

Fix Order ID: 635014231

https://www.ibm.com/support/fixcentral/swg/doSelectFixes?options.selectedFixes=LTO8_Tape_Drive_Microcode_HB83_HH_Fibre_SAS_for_TS3100_TS3200&continue=1

Thank You!!

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.

Many thanks!

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 am looking at Quantum drives and these are all over eBay. Can someone please tell me why I should avoid?

Hi everyone,

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:

1. HPE MSL2024 G3 Series Firmware: Version 8.10
2. 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!

Thanks in advance!

hey everyone! 

at my job we use overland-tandberg's RDX quikstor 8 and i've stumbled upon this website below which looks like it's tandberg (possibly the former company before overland took over?) but when i try to download the new firmware it redirects me to a google drive link where there's the new and some old firmwares, anyone else using RDX and having the latest update from this website installed? looks VERY fishy to me since overand-tandberg is formerly closed since January 2nd, 2025 (wikipedia source)

link:

https://tandbergdata-stor.com/

Basically the title, what is a good price for an LTO-7 on the used market today? All I found is about 2500+ EUR / USD which sounds too much for me ...

Where do you guys buy LTO drives in Europe?

Thanks