[geeks] The Wisdom of the Collective: Removable media

[Phil Stracchino]

So.  For quite a few years now I've been using LTO tape for backup.
Most recently a SAS LTO-4 drive.  And after being with it through four
generations of LTO tape technology over nearly 20 years, I'm getting
really tired of LTO's shit.

Well ... OK, I'm getting tired of the cleaning and maintenance issues of
a standalone external tape drive and my otherwise-excellent backup
software's increasingly poor handling of standalone tape drives.  And
I'm looking for a new backup storage solution.  With my monthly full
backups currently over 1.6TB, I'd like to be able to just plug in a
cartridge drive of some kind or other and not have to dick around with
tape changes and tape drive errors, I'd like to have per-volume capacity
at least in the 4TB range so that I'm not replacing media again next
year or the year after when my backups pass 2TB, and ideally I'd prefer
solid-state media.  (But FAST solid-state media, say SSDs; flash cards
and anything USB need not apply.)

And I'd prefer it be able to live in my server racks, but that's not
strictly a necessity.  On the other hand if it lives in my workstation I
alrwady have a SAS controller available (an LSI SAS2008 Fusion-MPT SAS-2).

So does anyone have any particular favored *hardware* for this sort of
removable-drive role?  I desperately need a better solution here.


-- 
  Phil Stracchino
  Babylon Communications
  phils at caerllewys.net
  phil at co.ordinate.org
  Landline: +1.603.293.8485
  Mobile:   +1.603.998.6958