SATA LTO drives?

[WANg]

Alright, time for a stupid question - so right now I have 4x4TB HGST Deskstar NAS drives on a raidz1 setup (in a MicroServer G7 N40L via FreeNAS), and I realized that maybe I should've slapped an extra 4TB up top and ran it on raidz2, my guess is that it might be a little too late for that one. (I'll need to take down an iSCSI connected ESXi datastore and a SMB share environment to get this one going).

So the quick question now is...is there such a thing as a SATA based LTO5 drive or something similar that I should look into, something that can slide into that optical drive bay of the N40L? I would rather have weekly backups to a few rotated tapes than to have nothing at all. Any thoughts or suggestions?
Yes, I know Dropbox/OneDrive is probably an option, but sending a few terabytes up to "the cloud" might take weeks, and I am not exactly feeling like I should trust them (Dropbox deployment via Powershell had been rather "meh" for me at work).

 

[dandanio]

I'd be interested as well... so far I have not seen anything like that, but let's see what others share...

 

[Rand__]

There is SAS, FC and USB afaik... never seen SATA LTO

 

[WANg]

There is SAS, FC and USB afaik... never seen SATA LTO

Yeah, that's what I am starting to suspect. There are these Dell Powervault RD1000 removable drives that claim to be SATA, but I've also heard that they are nothing but 1TByte 2.5" HDDs in a hardened container.

So it looks like what I'll need to do is pop a PCIe x1->SAS adapter, and then run a SAS cable to an internal LTO-4 or 5 drive. However, I heard that FreeNAS is fairly bad at writing data to tape drives for backup purposes.

 

[Rand__]

Why not add an internal 8/10 TB drive as backup medium?
Or an external drive via eSata or USB - never tried with FreeNas but should work?

Or USB based Tape? Will not be fast wit USB2 o/c.

If you can put a hba in a x1 slot (not sure you can fit it mechanically, you could also take one with an external port and attach a tape drive externally if it does not fit internally.

 

[WANg]

Why not add an internal 8/10 TB drive as backup medium?
Or an external drive via eSata or USB - never tried with FreeNas but should work?

Or USB based Tape? Will not be fast wit USB2 o/c.

If you can put a hba in a x1 slot (not sure you can fit it mechanically, you could also take one with an external port and attach a tape drive externally if it does not fit internally.

Well, I kinda want to avoid using an external backup to a single drive - after all, the entire idea of going to a zraid1 array was to eliminate a bunch of external USB drives. I am not about to spend more money on that - don't think the missus will approve of it. But then, now to think about it, I should've made it zraid2 (on 5 drives)...although who knows how long the RAID rebuild would take and whether the array will survive an extra drive dying before it even finishes. I think right now I am kinda leaning towards PCIe-to-SAS card (The Microserver G7 has a spare PCIe x1 slot) and then attaching an LTO4 or 5 drive to it. It does give me an excuse to buy some backup tapes and a tape drive, and then to figure out how to use bacula in FreeNAS.

Hmmm. That reminds me. I really should setup a TimeMachine clone on FreeNAS so I can backup the iTunes collection from my Mac Mini .

 

[dandanio]

[...] whether the array will survive an extra drive dying before it even finishes [...]

A bit off topic, but: that's why you cron weekly zpool scrubs. I am not worried that my pool recovers. Well, let me rephrase that: I am much less worried about it.

 

[WANg]

A bit off topic, but: that's why you cron weekly zpool scrubs. I am not worried that my pool recovers. Well, let me rephrase that: I am much less worried about it.

I do have weekly zpool scrubs - that being said, I might need to redo the entire zpool setup soon-ish. It makes more sense for me to switch OS from FreeNAS to OmniOS and retool the drives from 4x4TB zraid1 to RAID10.