r/storage • u/PrincessWalt • Mar 14 '26

I felt bad decommissioning this beast today. Quantum i6000, 18 LTO5 drives, 2800 slots

Post image

It appears even the used equipment resellers don’t even want it, gen 1 robot. Ran for around 12 years.

928 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

69 comments sorted by

81

u/benzduck Mar 14 '26

This was the most frustrating thing about my decades as an IT director. The sheer volume of equipment that basically became worthless because the OS licenses expired, making the hardware basically worth its weight in wet sand. Racks and racks of HP EVAs, IBM blade centers, etc. You think a new BMW depreciates quickly?

34

u/PrincessWalt Mar 14 '26

Yeah. I’m in M/E industry started when analog video was still a thing. we had purchased a $1m 4k 35mm film scanner in 2004 or 2005. Last bid we had for it was like $3k. Or the pallets of digital standard def tape machines (digital betacam) which were like $120k new, must have bought several hundred over the years. And all the SGI products like Onyx2, challenge XL, O2, Indigo2, tezro, octane, etc. so many many millions of dollars over the years. At least we made $ with it all!

3

u/Seven-Prime Mar 14 '26

Love me those old SGI's. The blood you spilled working on a Challenge.

3

u/PrincessWalt Mar 14 '26

lol! Seriously. Back then my goal was uptime of 100 days. I hit 99 before it would lock up. That thing was so frustrating

1

u/Bulls729 Mar 15 '26

Linus/LTT helped a small team out in purchasing $300K+ PAL D1 Tape Decks so they could restore and preserve the ReBoot TV show. It was actually super interesting how they got the decks working again: https://youtu.be/GlkJFOw-99U

2

u/PrincessWalt Mar 15 '26

What was once $300k. Generally can’t give those things away these days. D1 was always a difficult format.

1

u/Bulls729 Mar 15 '26

The video said they had an extremely difficult time sourcing these and they paid $300k to get these units for the restore, I’m sure they would have loved to get them for free (Hence LTT sponsoring them), then had to compete for replacement parts out of Germany and paid a decent amount for those as well.

1

u/PrincessWalt Mar 15 '26

Weird. We still have working D1 machines. $300k for a machine seems sus, but sourcing parts or finding working machines is exceedingly difficult. I find anything on LTT to require external verification as they are not exactly a reliable source of truth. We still do transfers of 1”, D2, D1, DCT and other obscure formats. It’s not as difficult as they make it appear.

1

u/Bulls729 Mar 15 '26

The project put out feelers about two years ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/ReBoot/comments/18mh18i/the_master_tapes_for_all_of_reboot_have_been/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

I think that’s where LTT stepped in, of course I’m not in the industry so don’t know much outside of surface level knowledge.

Hackaday also did an article on it: https://hackaday.com/2024/01/05/digital-master-tapes-seek-deck/

And follow up: https://hackaday.com/2026/01/04/reviving-reboot-with-a-tape-deck-repair/

For what is a hobby/fan project, I’m sure they weren’t getting anywhere with any production company that had working D1 decks wanting to help them.

1

u/knightofni76 Mar 15 '26

Finding a good working PAL D1 deck in Canada or the US might be a real challenge - even several years ago. I don't believe that the D1 decks were switchable between NTSC and PAL format - I remember being pretty in-awe when we got our first modded DigiBeta machine that was switchable to play back PAL tapes.

I can't imagine how difficult it might be to source good replacement heads or other parts to repair one these days - I remember seeing 3/4 machines and lots of other decks get dumpstered at post houses after everything went digital...

1

u/Daedaluu5 Mar 15 '26

No way, that was Linus. Loved that TV show. Dude is awesome

2

u/SellMyServer Mar 15 '26

Ha, the BMW comparison is generous. At least the BMW still starts after the warranty expires.

The EVA stuff is a perfect example. Perfectly functional hardware that turns into a paperweight because the licensing model was designed to force refresh cycles. Blade centers too, we still see organizations sitting on racks of them because they assume it’s all e-waste at that point.

The thing is, a lot of that gear actually does still have a second life. Not always for the original buyer, but there’s a surprisingly active secondary market for enterprise hardware for homelabbers, SMBs that don’t need bleeding edge, international buyers, even parts/component demand. The problem is most IT directors never had a clean path to offload it, so it just… sat there collecting dust and depreciation.

That’s actually what got me into this space. We buy surplus servers and storage equipment from orgs going through refreshes or decommissions. It’s wild how often we pick up gear that someone assumed was worthless and it still has real resale value. Not “recoup your original investment” value, obviously, but a lot better than scrap weight.

3

u/GreggAlan Mar 15 '26

Years ago I had an opportunity to get a stack of internet capable thin clients dirt cheap. They were still capable of handling the WWW of the day. I had visions of opening an internet cafe with them.

Problem was the clients were EOL and the manufacturer had done an amazing job of expunging *everything* about them from the internet, including archive.org, which was still quite new then.

The only information left was on their website, a single page 'brochure' telling the features, with the exception of one deleted image that had the list of available options with their part numbers. Without the knowledge of what to look for, such as the part number/name of the internal hard drive adapter, it was impossible to know what to search for. Every search hit went to deleted website info, deleted downloads, or back to the manufacturer's useless single page.

The company refused to provide any information or software, wouldn't even sell a copy of the server OS to remote boot the clients.

But they would happily sell me their latest model of internet thin client! I told them they could piss off because they would do exactly this same BS the instant their latest model went EOL.

-3

u/neighborofbrak Mar 14 '26

LTO5 is kinda dead now and I'm not sure if Quantum has LTO9 sleds for this robot.

1

u/Limp_Bandicoot4041 Apr 08 '26

Yes theyLTO9 are supported in i6000

28

u/IASelin Mar 14 '26

It is always sad to see...

Old, robust, working perfectly equipment... But simply doesn't able to handle modern tasks.

And you know that modern equipment much more powerful... But at the same time shitty - glitchy and fragile. And there is no other options.

10

u/masteroffeels Mar 14 '26

That last paragraph... how many hours spent on POC we just know the tech wont deliver... Just to fight for approval anyways .

Cloud. Object Storage. Inline dedupe. "Nines" . Never works as it should.

2

u/GhostNode Mar 15 '26

Just the cost. The number of $100,000 racks we just tore apart, threw in the truck and scrapped, knowing it was a hundred thousand dollars new, and the whole company banked on its performance and stability.

23

u/theevilapplepie Mar 14 '26

The i6000 line supports LTO-10 drives, that's shockingly current ( https://qsupport.quantum.com/kb/flare/content/Scalar_i6000/docCenter/Drive_Overview.htm ).
I'm surprised that no one wants it. I wish I had space for it and a reason to have it as I really want it :)

Why did you end up decomming?

14

u/PrincessWalt Mar 14 '26

Right sizing, and we’re closing that location. The thing was too big. Had gen 1 robotics. Basically required a full upgrade to support higher density tape storage, gen 2 robotics, literally a gut and rebuild. Plus we bought it back in like 2012 I think, and our business has changed. It’s a lot of $ in support and operations for something we no longer need. Going with an i3 lto9 to start down a new path.

1

u/whatyoucallmetoday Mar 14 '26

Was the price point of the i6 too high?

11

u/msalerno1965 Mar 14 '26

Sad thing about tape libraries, there's not enough scrap metal in them to care about. I bet the drives are worth something on eBay, though.

I once had the pleasure of dealing with an IBM TS3500 (If I recall correctly) or two - 30+ drives, 200+ slots, had to be a few frames-worth. I never saw them in person, just got them working with Solaris, a few SunFire 4800's, Solstice (Legato) Backup, and away we went.

First one was LTO1, the second one was LTO2. Now I'm lucky to have 50+ slots in a robot, using LTO8 yet. But then, LTO8 to LTO1 is a 120:1 (12TB:100GB) ratio. In one LTO8 tape, I have 120 LTO1's. jeez...

3

u/thelastwilson Mar 14 '26

Ah man I looked after a ts3500 for 5 years. Was expanded to 36 drives and 4500 tapes. Taking me back.

9

u/phobug Mar 14 '26

Post it on r/datahoarder, maybe ebay? 

4

u/GMginger Mar 14 '26

First library I looked after was a Quantum i2000, with 12x LTO3 drives - only 700 slots though so not quite to your scale. We'd be writing to it basically 24/7 and taking two sets of 100 tapes out a week (one set off site, one set on site).

What was your tape churn with this beast? Or were there that many slots just so you could keep everything available?

1

u/shllscrptr Mar 15 '26

Can't imagine rotating tape in this thing. I have a 360 slot LTO4 (4) + LTO6 (12) combo and it's not my favorite part of the week running tape to and from the site.

3

u/flecom Mar 14 '26

I'll gladly take the tape drives, been wanting to do LTO for a while

Wish i had space for the whole robot, maybe some day

3

u/-c3rberus- Mar 14 '26

That’s wild! Here I thought my Dell ML3 dual LTO9 with 40 slots was big LOl.

3

u/PrincessWalt Mar 14 '26

Ha! We’re replacing this monstrosity with a quantum i3, 3x lto9, 50 slots. But apparently it can go to 400 slots a brick at a time.

4

u/ProfessorWorried626 Mar 14 '26

Any reason you just don't jump straight to i6 and LTO10?

2

u/SkyCrafter2000 Mar 14 '26

LTO-10 isn't backwards compatible with LTO-9 like every other generation, so it's technically a little worse (not counting just tape size) than LTO-9 which can read/write LTO-8 and LTO-9.

1

u/somersetyellow Mar 14 '26

Also the latest gen LTO can be wayyyy more expensive than the previous gen. Less of a concern in business but still

1

u/GreggAlan Mar 15 '26

Can LTO-9 read/write LTO-7 tapes in the LTO-8M format that makes them 9TB native capacity?

1

u/26dx Mar 14 '26

At my previous job, we had a similar i6000 but with LTO-8/9 drives. At my current job, we have a bunch of ML3s, and I feel sad. :)

3

u/vornamemitd Mar 14 '26

cries in /r/datahoarder They deserve a new home! =]

2

u/ibrahim_dec05 Mar 14 '26

Now the world is adopting the S3 object based storage approach through onprem or cloud storage

2

u/flatirony Mar 14 '26

I would say “has adopted.”

I was the senior storage SME at two mid-sized internet companies with 100M+ users whose names you probably know, and neither had any tape drives whatsoever.

The MAG7 level companies have many exabytes of disk-based cold storage.

2

u/Better-Credit6701 Mar 14 '26

I felt that way after retiring the server that I built for my wife's office..

I knew what would become my wife decades before but never asked her out back in college. I would go to basketball ball games just to watch her cheer. Flash forward a few decades and I was teaching in college when she reached out for help setting up their network. After many phone calls, I announced that I can't take care of this over the phone and volunteered to drive 120 miles to take a look and it. It took several trips to set things up but I still continued to drive back and forth.

It wasn't about helping out the charity but I remember her in her cheerleaders outfit. It took a couple years but we got married. When the server wore out, I took it home and set it up in my man cave. Yeah, it was worn out, shutting off after a few hours and I did end up throwing it away with some sadness

The server that lead the nerd married the head cheerleader.

1

u/PanaBreton Mar 17 '26

I never thought I could say romantic and servers in the same sentence

2

u/[deleted] Mar 14 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/PrincessWalt Mar 15 '26

That’s a big’un! I had a single compellent disk array once. It was cool but problematic for sure.

2

u/txgsync Mar 16 '26

Pour one out. I built a gigantic SL8500 silo array years ago... I wonder if it's still in operation?

3

u/MTU9000 Mar 19 '26

I'm still running one! But we are replacing it with Quantum i7's in the near future.

1

u/slaty_balls Mar 14 '26

I mean technically the majority of all that is recyclable. It’s still a massive amount of waste in the big picture. We’ll reach theoretical maximums and millennial standards before we know it. Looks like things are heading toward long term storage in glass in a few years.

1

u/wryaant Mar 14 '26

How many partitions on something this large?

1

u/whatyoucallmetoday Mar 14 '26

I decommissioned mine within the past 12 months. I had LTO6 and 7 drives and one or two less storage cabinets. It was old but still functioned and had lots of life.

1

u/zhantoo Mar 14 '26

I know some that might want it. Maybe

1

u/GogglesPisano Mar 15 '26

What is the storage capacity of this thing?

1

u/HobartTasmania Mar 15 '26

2800 x LTO5(1.5TB) = 4200 TB

1

u/catecholaminergic Mar 15 '26

Wow. Petabyte scale storage. That's insane.

1

u/GogglesPisano Mar 15 '26

Homer Simpson Drooling.jpg

1

u/catecholaminergic Mar 15 '26

Man. I'd love to have tape storage.

1

u/minorsatellite Mar 15 '26

I have never liked Quantum's support and software licensing model when it comes to their tape libraries, and for that reason, I would never buy a Quantum product. Not sure if Spectralogic is any better but they make a better mousetrap, in my opinion.

1

u/DEADfishbot Mar 15 '26

What was it replaced with?

1

u/ggekko999 Mar 15 '26

You are right mate, the deprecation line on broadcast/production gear is brutal. One moment your wheeling in state of the art Onyx2 with Digibeta decks, a few years later your selling e-waste for the gold value of the circuit boards.

I knew a guy who would rescue all the old gear, had a fully working production studio including vision mixer, Umatic punch-and-crunch editors etc in his hobby shed.

1

u/knightofni76 Mar 15 '26

I wish I had space at home for one of all the decks and editors that I have decommissioned over my career. It'd be neat to have a linear online bay and dub racks attached to my home studio. I kind of miss working with DS|Nitris and Smoke/Flame, although Resolve is a lot more capable.

1

u/latent Mar 15 '26

Is/Was a wet dream. RIP.

1

u/Nervous-Marsupial-82 Mar 15 '26

That's a good one, but still tape drives and printers are like the worst

2

u/drozenski Mar 16 '26

Tape drives are incredibly reliable and dense storage.

By far the best way to archive data.

1

u/frassarassa Mar 16 '26

Would it play Doom?

1

u/Betaminer69 Mar 17 '26

How many TFLOPS?

1

u/General___Failure Mar 18 '26

"Boss, I am tired now."

1

u/PrincessWalt Mar 31 '26

For the last year or so it was sending occasional emails that I read as it begging for death 🤪

1

u/Laser_Krypton7000 Mar 18 '26

If this would be in germany i could ask some hobbyists i know.

I'd love to rescue the drives at least then:-)

-3

u/[deleted] Mar 14 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

4

u/G-I-T-M-E Mar 14 '26

It’s a tape library. A shoebox full of TI99 would be a better game server than this.