Tape drive conversion

[gisshan]

Hi everyone,

Sorry if this is the wrong place to post this. I tried searching and tape drive posts were scattered through many areas.

I have a couple LTO 7 tape drives. Both of them are internal half height drives. I have seen some conversations about using a library drive as an internal or external drive. I was wondering if it is possible to go the other way. Id like to put my internal drives in a library.

Does anyone have any experience / information on this? One drive is a Quantum and I believe the other is an IBM.

Thanks in advance for any information.

 

[ari2asem]

do you really need library function ??

can you use dell 114x ??

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[gisshan]

Thank you for the suggestion. However, I am a bit of a data hoarder and am looking to backup a large amount of data.

 

[Generic George]

I have a similar question. I have an old SCSI LTO-3 Dell 124T tape library and I was wondering if it was possible to swap out the old LTO drive for a newer one. Does it need to be a Dell drive or will any drive work? I assume it would need to be a scsi drive.

 

[BoredSysadmin]

@gisshan - I guess it should work assuming drives/library match expected interfaces - For example, this library, Dell TL4000 with newer firmware should support LTO7 tape drives, I however won't be able to 100% tell you which exactly drive interface it supports. I know he has the same library in our HQ office and then tape drives were replaced, it didn't like the SAS drive until it was swapped for the correct FC drive.

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[leon_pro]

Does anyone have any experience / information on this? One drive is a Quantum and I believe the other is an IBM.

Quantum is rebtanded HP. I have a stand-alone HP drive in msl2024 library, and it shows warning about 'unsupported drive', but library still works. There's different firmware versions for library and standallone drives and you can't cross-flash it (with standard tools), but drives seems to be identical.
Technically you can desolder ROM chip and re-program it. I never tried it.

 

[leon_pro]

Does it need to be a Dell drive or will any drive work?

As I know, curtently only HP and IBM make tape drives. Quantum and Fujitsu are HP drives, Dell is IBM. I am not expecting HP drive to work in Dell library, but IBM may work. Double check it.