How are you using SMR based drives?
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I'm wondering how others are using SMR based drives. Clearly there are situations where their performance is acceptable. Also, use within any RAID setup seems to not be recommended and it's unlikely many are creating custom implementations of Reed-Solomon erasure encoding. How can these best be used in multi-drive setups for example?
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@larsen161 said:
I'm wondering how others are using SMR based drives. Clearly there are situations where their performance is acceptable. Also, use within any RAID setup seems to not be recommended and it's unlikely many are creating custom implementations of Reed-Solomon erasure encoding. How can these best be used in multi-drive setups for example?
They are really just meant for backups where the drive will not be powered on much..
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I've not seen anyone considering these yet. Very much for archival use, the write impact is potentially enormous for traditional usages.
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We're working with Seagate now to make their 8TB (and 10 and 14 soon) drives usable for ANYTHING but it turns out even log-structured file system eliminating random and small writes does not help much. Still trying to find a solution, no ETA yet.
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@KOOLER said:
We're working with Seagate now to make their 8TB (and 10 and 14 soon) drives usable for ANYTHING but it turns out even log-structured file system eliminating random and small writes does not help much. Still trying to find a solution, no ETA yet.
Do the SMR drives even match tape write speeds?
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@travisdh1 said:
@KOOLER said:
We're working with Seagate now to make their 8TB (and 10 and 14 soon) drives usable for ANYTHING but it turns out even log-structured file system eliminating random and small writes does not help much. Still trying to find a solution, no ETA yet.
Do the SMR drives even match tape write speeds?
Do normal drives?
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Normal desktop SATA drive has a write speed of around 90MB/s at peak and rarely can hit that and never sustain it.
LTO6 has a sustained sequential write speed of 160MB/s. More than double the average drive.
LTO7 takes that up to 300MB/s. Faster than any 15K Drive is likely hit, let alone sustain.
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LTO 8 is supposed to hit 427MB/s sustained once it releases. Which we don't have a date for yet.
That's all uncompressed. LTO7 compressed is often do 750MB/s. Faster than even decently large RAID arrays in many cases. And that's to a single drive, not a tape array.
So, just as a quick comparison, you would generally expect 20 NL-SAS drives in RAID 10 to be needed to match the typical write performance of a single LTO7 tape drive today.
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@scottalanmiller said:
LTO 8 is supposed to hit 427MB/s sustained once it releases. Which we don't have a date for yet.
That's all uncompressed. LTO7 compressed is often do 750MB/s. Faster than even decently large RAID arrays in many cases. And that's to a single drive, not a tape array.
So, just as a quick comparison, you would generally expect 20 NL-SAS drives in RAID 10 to be needed to match the typical write performance of a single LTO7 tape drive today.
I knew write speeds have gone up since I used DLT2 drives back in the late 90s, but wow, that's impressive.
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Wait till you see LTO10 with a 2.7GB/s speed!! It's going to be nuts. And 48TB raw on each cartridge!
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@scottalanmiller said:
Wait till you see LTO10 with a 2.7GB/s speed!! It's going to be nuts. And 48TB raw on each cartridge!
I'd be drooling if I thought the drives themselves would be affordable. Maybe @xbyte will have some LTO 7 or 8 hardware by then? hint hint
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@travisdh1 said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Wait till you see LTO10 with a 2.7GB/s speed!! It's going to be nuts. And 48TB raw on each cartridge!
I'd be drooling if I thought the drives themselves would be affordable. Maybe @xbyte will have some LTO 7 or 8 hardware by then? hint hint
I've not looked to see if xByte is carrying tape systems. I am a semi-fan of tape (I hate it theoretically but I know that it is the right tool much of the time.) I've had lots of tapes die on my over the years, but in a good environment they do really well. But in the SMB we rarely need LTO5 so it doesn't come up often.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@travisdh1 said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Wait till you see LTO10 with a 2.7GB/s speed!! It's going to be nuts. And 48TB raw on each cartridge!
I'd be drooling if I thought the drives themselves would be affordable. Maybe @xbyte will have some LTO 7 or 8 hardware by then? hint hint
I've not looked to see if xByte is carrying tape systems. I am a semi-fan of tape (I hate it theoretically but I know that it is the right tool much of the time.) I've had lots of tapes die on my over the years, but in a good environment they do really well. But in the SMB we rarely need LTO5 so it doesn't come up often.
Yeah, the upfront cost just doesn't make sense in the SMB environment. Which is why the last tape drive I used were DLT2. External HDD just make lots more sense in smaller environments today, or online of some sort if you've got the bandwidth.
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We use SMR's in OBR10 to backup big video chunks. Works fine but I wouldn't use it for small files or an active OS.
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@scottalanmiller said:
LTO 8 is supposed to hit 427MB/s sustained once it releases. Which we don't have a date for yet.
That's all uncompressed. LTO7 compressed is often do 750MB/s. Faster than even decently large RAID arrays in many cases. And that's to a single drive, not a tape array.
So, just as a quick comparison, you would generally expect 20 NL-SAS drives in RAID 10 to be needed to match the typical write performance of a single LTO7 tape drive today.
Damn rights! Tape is FAST!
Lots of people actually wear out their tape drive heads and cartridges by not being able to push data at them fast enough. This causes repeated wind/rewind and repeated writes and all sorts of other nonsense. Always make sure you can blast your tape with more speed than it can handle.
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@MattSpeller said:
@scottalanmiller said:
LTO 8 is supposed to hit 427MB/s sustained once it releases. Which we don't have a date for yet.
That's all uncompressed. LTO7 compressed is often do 750MB/s. Faster than even decently large RAID arrays in many cases. And that's to a single drive, not a tape array.
So, just as a quick comparison, you would generally expect 20 NL-SAS drives in RAID 10 to be needed to match the typical write performance of a single LTO7 tape drive today.
Damn rights! Tape is FAST!
Lots of people actually wear out their tape drive heads and cartridges by not being able to push data at them fast enough. This causes repeated wind/rewind and repeated writes and all sorts of other nonsense. Always make sure you can blast your tape with more speed than it can handle.
Really? I had no idea... but of course that completely makes sense.
Pretty soon we'll see tape drives with TB's of onboard storage so it can be cached there before actually being written to tape.
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@Dashrender said:
@MattSpeller said:
@scottalanmiller said:
LTO 8 is supposed to hit 427MB/s sustained once it releases. Which we don't have a date for yet.
That's all uncompressed. LTO7 compressed is often do 750MB/s. Faster than even decently large RAID arrays in many cases. And that's to a single drive, not a tape array.
So, just as a quick comparison, you would generally expect 20 NL-SAS drives in RAID 10 to be needed to match the typical write performance of a single LTO7 tape drive today.
Damn rights! Tape is FAST!
Lots of people actually wear out their tape drive heads and cartridges by not being able to push data at them fast enough. This causes repeated wind/rewind and repeated writes and all sorts of other nonsense. Always make sure you can blast your tape with more speed than it can handle.
Really? I had no idea... but of course that completely makes sense.
Pretty soon we'll see tape drives with TB's of onboard storage so it can be cached there before actually being written to tape.
That's more or less how you're supposed to design them ideally. Build a slave target box full of HDDs you'd back up to hourly / daily / whatever then let loose with the tape at night / weekly for one big monster write job all at once. With a decent sized tape library with dual drives you'd be hard pressed to keep it well fed with data otherwise. Bonus is recovery time for the live data on the slave box is really fast.
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@Dashrender said:
@MattSpeller said:
@scottalanmiller said:
LTO 8 is supposed to hit 427MB/s sustained once it releases. Which we don't have a date for yet.
That's all uncompressed. LTO7 compressed is often do 750MB/s. Faster than even decently large RAID arrays in many cases. And that's to a single drive, not a tape array.
So, just as a quick comparison, you would generally expect 20 NL-SAS drives in RAID 10 to be needed to match the typical write performance of a single LTO7 tape drive today.
Damn rights! Tape is FAST!
Lots of people actually wear out their tape drive heads and cartridges by not being able to push data at them fast enough. This causes repeated wind/rewind and repeated writes and all sorts of other nonsense. Always make sure you can blast your tape with more speed than it can handle.
Really? I had no idea... but of course that completely makes sense.
Pretty soon we'll see tape drives with TB's of onboard storage so it can be cached there before actually being written to tape.
If by "pretty soon" you mean "a decade ago." Then... YES!
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@MattSpeller said:
That's more or less how you're supposed to design them ideally.
For those not aware, it is known as "Disk 2 Disk 2 Tape" or D2D2T.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@MattSpeller said:
That's more or less how you're supposed to design them ideally.
For those not aware, it is known as "Disk 2 Disk 2 Tape" or D2D2T.
I'd suggest something more like:
D2D2T2[offsite storage company that will rotate your tape back to you while maintaining 12 months of monthly so you don't have to buy an endless quantity of tape (which most of them will happily sell / bring to you automatically for your permanent year end one until you accumulate enough years that they can rotate those back to you as well (typically 5 to 10) which I highly recommend because putting the stickers on each tape (@*#&% SUCKS and if you're off by a millimeter it'll jam up and cause headaches in your autoloader that'll have you cursing like a sailor while fishing little bits of sticky goo off the rails of the autoloader don't ask me how I know!!!! inhales).]
