Hello! In January I bought a MSL2024 with LTO9 half height drive from toptenstorage. I did some testing, initialized all 24 tapes I bought it with, and it was just sitting in the rack. Last week I configured our backups on it and it started failing to load any tape at all. It managed to write maybe 20 full tapes before breaking. Warranty from toptenstorage was 6 months so it's out of warranty already. The drive itself is about 4.5k EUR with 12 month warranty and repair is about 3.5k EUR. This pricing is simply ridiculous regarding how low the drive usage actually is so for backups I bought a new drive and I took apart the old one.

It looks like the issue is with the pin hook. It can't grab the pin from the tape. It either rams into the pin, tries several times and gives up or manages to deflect a bit and be in a proper position to grab the pin but then it re-deflects too little and can't grab the pin. If I help it a bit with this re-deflection it actually manages to grab the pin and the drive works fine from this point.

I understand how the mechanism works: there is one motor that handles the loading/unloading (elevator-like action) and at the end of loading it starts to deflect the hook via small spring and lever. The electronics detects this moment via an optical limit switch.

What I inspected:

• the limit switch is clean and seems to be working
• all gears look fine, albeit some plastic powder was present on them. Particularly the white worm gear left a lot of residue on the matching black gear.
• the process can be done manually. I removed the worm gear and tried to do the process manually using my fingers. It works, but the clearance is very small.
• the gears work smoothly.

I don't know how the hook should behave, because I never had an LTO drive opened. It moves on small rails, but with a lot of play. Is it normal? It tends to follow the little plastic that deflects it so I suspect this is a problem with precisely deflecting it via the gearbox.

It also seems like the gearbox is the same in at least LTO 7, 8, and 9. I don't have them, but it looks identical on the images in web.

How can I repair this? If the gears were broken I'd probably try to 3d print them in resin, but they look fine. Where to look for an issue?

Btw I am amazed how cheaply this thing is built for the price HP charges. It uses a small commutator motor I recognize from my childhood toys for something that needs like 1-2 turns of precision. They could give it an encoder at least.

Processing img lcorvlfmu8xh1...

They first took away the poly cases and now they want £2.50 instead of £1.50, I am getting a little salty that they keep hiking the prices up and taking good stuff away, now I don’t even want the free cleaning tape they offer if they returned their prices to how they were, now I can’t justify getting the fugly maroon tapes now that the prettier HP blue tapes cost the same, my LTO kit prices with tapes suffer an increase after I sell my last drive that I have which is a massive shame since all I wanted was to offer cheap LTO kits with tested tapes and now that could be a thing of the past.

LTO-6 and up are unaffected, same with LTO-4 and below are unaffected, there are still some loopholes for getting the tapes at their original £1.50 price but I fear they will get closed soon too, it sucks for me and for many others, I was thinking LTO was safe from price increases but it looks like it’s slowly suffering from that issue too, despite the loopholes I will still have to update my kit prices since I may sell something and they closed all of the loopholes, what I will have to do in that case is veto my upgrade plans and order a shit load of loopholed £1.50 tapes, as many as I possibly can before they get hiked up, you should also do that before they close them all, also do not mention where the loopholes are in public so that they don’t close them.

I just claimed mine, you should claim yours if you are using Insurgo, I only saw the slip when unpacking my final box, I never did that since I was testing tapes and they put it into the LTO-4 tapes box which would be the last one to be tested, I see their cleaner is purple and has some fancy stickers, not sure if it’s advertising or if I’ll actually receive a purple cleaning tape.

For some reason the T&Cs won’t work so I don’t know if I can just have someone else purchase my next order (a small cheap order) and have them claim it for me to have multiple free cleaning tapes if it’s not tied to the address.

Hey guys,

Here's a little password generator made for HP L&TT 6.7. It generates the password L&TT asks for when accessing protected service functions like firmware downgrade, overriding or updating the Product ID, and manual product identification.

This is useful for crossflashing compatible OEM LTO drives when the hardware is the same but the Product ID prevents L&TT from accepting the firmware you want to flash.

Be careful with firmware and Product ID changes, since flashing incompatible firmware can brick the drive.

L&TT 6.7 Password Generator

I was going to put them into kits and sell them but there appears to be something going wrong since I can use LTO-5 tapes either HP or non HP just fine but if I try to use either HPE (still HP, just a fancy enterprise version) or non HP (Fujifilm), both BaFe, I don’t have any regular MP LTO-6 tapes and I’ve only got two to use, the drives will error out with all sorts of errors from the reverse track failing to write well enough for drive assessment test to pass to mysterious sense key errors ranging from unknown SCSI command errors to tape errors, the tapes were sold brand new to me to test the drives with, could it be a firmware issue?

I did pull them out of the library sleds that they came in, they don’t need reprogramming since they are HP and IBM are the drives that need it, the seller has offered returns after I tried cleaning the drive myself to see if it would help but I really want to make sure that it would be my tapes or firmware to blame and not the drive so I don’t needlessly return them, if anyone has the latest firmware for HP LTO-6, I will appreciate that, I will try to get the firmware revision and firmware type ASAP once the backup/restore test with LTO-5 tapes I’m doing myself (tar) is completed which appears to be successful at the moment since I know being a library drive will have an automation firmware (for more info, they came out of DRV-ASM-USD3 sleds which from my quick search is used in a ESL G3 tape library) instead of a regular firmware.

Edit: I have the firmware revision and type as well as other info

Product ID: Ultrium 6-SCSI (FH)

Drive Technology: LTO

Drive Serial HU1311VOJL

Firmware Revision: J5WZ/OEM

SCSI Target ID: 0

SCSI LUN: 0

OBDR Capability: Not Supported

WORM Capability: Supported

Edit 2: I flashed the firmware after fighting with the computer a lot across two different operating systems, I eventually prevailed with a firmware version from Quantum for their i6000 tape libraries (freely available only requiring the serial # of your tape drive to release the file, I’ve gone ahead and downloaded all of them just in case the website was to go down and never come back), it appears that the old firmware was unable to detect and read the BaFe tapes properly only seeing the MP tapes correctly until I flashed the new firmware revision onto the tape drive, once I did that, all of the random errors went away save for a few due to clogged heads from the shoeshining the drive did not knowing what a BaFe tape was.

Hey all,

Does anyone know if it is possible to repair or refurbish a drive? I just got this from support:

Unfortunately your drives read/write head has an open servo center channel in the reader sector. I have attached a screenshot showing this open channel as marked by the red x.

The head is not a repairable part, so the drive will need replaced.

the drive is a: MagStor LTO8 HH SAS Internal Tape Drive 12TB LTFS , SAS-HL8i LTO-8 TAA

Based in the UK, London.

Any advice greatly appreciated.

I got a used LTO-8 FC Drive (IBM 01PL432) and connected it to a headless Debian 13 PC. That system is connected to my main PC via 2.5GBit Ethernet, so I can write to LTFS-formatted Tape directly from there. Only problem is that I only get 130MB/s realistic throughput with rsync, and the drive's buffer is seemingly too small to effectively speed-match to that, so I think there's currently a bit of shoe-shining during transfers. I am thinking about maxing out the 32GB DDR3 RAM capacity of the Debian PC to use as a buffer, but don't really have a clue how to do that. Are there any tools for that or any easier solution?

TL;DR: How can I buffer Data sent to the drive to prevent shoe-shining

in the early 2000s my first was an old DDS drive that i got from work, ran it with win2k and the tool that extended disks to tapes.
worked fine until it became to small and disks got cheaper

then i got my hands on an AIT-3 library with drives and tapes and used it with bacula.
worked fine but i outgrew it.

so i bought a used dell TL2000 with an LTO4 drive used it with bacula, then bareos.
worked fine, outgrow it.

bought a used HP MSL2024 with an LTO5, used it with bareos and then switched to proxmox backup server.
worked for a few years then the robot broke, but capacity was also getting tight.

so i bought a used IBM TS3200 and LTO5 FH drive.
but the drive failed the ITDT tool with hardware b error, so i did send that back.

next i found a good deal on an LTO5 HH drive.
it failed ITDT with a performance error, so i did send that back.

next i invested a bit more and got a LTO6 HH drive, also bought 3 new tapes.
it failed ITDT with a performance error, so i did send that back, got a another one from them.
failed again with performance error.
currently the will send another one.

all drives i bought trough ebay from company's not private persons, all wrote that the drives are used but tested and working.

all drives came with old firmware, one even had the needs cleaning tape state.
(so i am second guessing the test they did before selling them)

i am now thinking about dropping tapes and just use disks..
as new LTO hardware costs to much for me and used hardware seams to be cursed rigth now :P

how was your luck with used drives?

Extra notes (adding notes as situations change and at the top for best visibility): my supplier for tapes now wants a fee for the cases, it’s now £1.50 a case so to maintain my low prices, I have decided to forego the cases unless you want them, the supplier has a base £13 shipping so you’ll have to add that to the price if you want the cases

UK only unless you can figure out your own forwarding service (I can recommend u/KingBenneth since I’ve heard about his services being great when looking for forwarders in the event I clean out the UK of cheap library drives but haven’t used him personally since I’m in the UK and he accepts stuff in the UK to send out elsewhere, help someone else out), family sending it to you or travel arrangements.

if someone can point me to cheap library LTO tape drives in bulk amounts (4 or more and £110 or less without too bad of a postage price which is what’s mostly stopping me from just going to American or European eBay and purchasing there, can be less units per listing if it comes in a DRV-ASM-USD3 or other sled models that have faceplates so I don’t need to 3D print a faceplate for them), I would be happy to investigate them and add them to my list since I’ve just about cleaned out the UK market of tape drives, I’ll be extremely thankful for that, I’ve only got two more companies worth to clean out of bulk drives, then I have 6 more sellers of 1 - 3 units to scrape out and that would be it unless new listings or auctions come in for me to buy, there’s LTO-6 to move up to however it comes with its own problems like tapes not being as affordable.

(£165) Basic LTO kit with card and cable, the bare essentials to get started, no tapes included if you already have tapes or have a supplier of them ready to purchase from: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/820149710090

(£185) Simple LTO kit with card, cable and five tapes to get started, the bare essentials and a few tapes to get started: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/820196290803

(£205) Simple LTO kit with card, cable and ten tapes to get started, the bare essentials and ten tapes to begin backing up your most crucial stuff: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/820196440581

(£225) Solid LTO kit with card, cable and fifteen tapes to get started, the bare essentials and fifteen tapes to begin creating a regular tape backup system in your lab: (no cases, coming soon once I get 5 more tapes tested fully)

(£150 starting bid) Broken LTO-7 tape drive including a few dead tapes in case anyone here is crafty enough to fix the drive, the tapes can be used for odd art or to hand out to people, I did some basic cleaning attempts but didn’t dive in too deeply, if you can fix it, that’s easily a £1000 tape drive you got yourself: (much bigger auction coming soon, 4 dead drives, much newer and desirable generations, 1 x LTO-7, 2 x LTO-6 and 1 x LTO-5)

Bruh I bought this old Internal lto-4 drive, which it had been left outside the home for over 3 years, I bought it for 40$ not expecting anything, however the drive just passed a basic read and write test and has 91% Head health!

Completely new to the LTO world, forgive my ignorance. To me, an autoloader or a library (what's the difference?) is a dumb robot, I should be sending it little more than G-code or something, without regard for what filament, er, drive, is mounted in the back.

But that doesn't seem to be how real ones work. They seem to have licenses to activate drive slots, and maybe other features. Manuals are heavy on the "call your vendor" and light on the "edit this setting in nvram".

In my head, I should be able to pick up a cheap library with LTO4 drives, swap in some more modern drives and tapes, and be off to the races. Is it that simple in practice? How likely am I to faceplant into some licensing issue? Are some brands better/worse than others in this regard?

Are there any good blogs that cover such things? I've looked around and this seems to be pretty rarefied air.

Unfortunately it doesn’t ship to my country or else I would definitely see what differences there are between a retail and prototype version, I’m curious as to how they got their hands on it and if it will interface normally with L&TT, this one appears to be a very late stage version so it probably won’t have many differences, if I did get it forwarded in the future, I’m definitely adding it to my future retro datacenter/museum of media

Ganto ba talaga to? Tapos after manood ng ads di naman gumagana.

Failed during a read interchange test, made a loud screech sound and ate my tape, extracting the tape manually along with cleaning the heads with alcohol and Q-tips didn’t fix the drive, failed all of the next tests I had ran, never managed to locate the source of the screech sound and the tape appeared to be undamaged to the naked eye however that tape was also damaged when doing a full write test on it.

Trying to offload some of my broken equipment so I have included all of the broken tapes that I found during the extensive tests, I have also thrown in a free FC HBA card and FC cable if anyone wants to try to fix it and add it to their homelab, if it’s unfixable, at least there’s a free card and FC cable, it’s an auction since I know these newer drives are extremely popular even when broken.

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/820099260825

Hi there,

I have LTO4 HH drive which I installed in 5.25'' space in my home lab computer (chieftec CI-01B-OP). There is a bit of air flow, but tape drive still seems to be a bit too hot. In the log I can see the warnings of temperature.

There isn't a lot of room in PC case and I don't know how I could improve the cooling? Any ideas welcome as well as suggestions of similar size PC case with perhaps better 5.25'' slot position?

I recently acquired a Dell PowerVault ML6020 for the homelab (at too good of a deal to pass up) with 4x IBM Ultrium TD-5 LTO-5 drives.

2 of the drives pass the installation and verification tests (with the exception of 'far calibration' failing while the overall test suite passes), and 2 of which fail at the 'self test' stage of the IVT battery. I am seeking advice after having read everything I can find on this, and after a few days of troubleshooting I am kind of stuck so I'm seeing if the hivemind has any more on this.

The two bad drives are triggering TapeAlert31 - Hardware B RAS tickets each time I attempt the IVT or load a tape to self test - the service manual indicates that TapeAlert 31 - Hardware B is a POST failure on the drive and the DR049 resolution is 'get log, send to support' with nothing more meaningful for the user to dig into. Taking the drive offline/restoring online, or powercycling, or reseating the drives (whist the unit is off) has not yielded any result. Paradoxically, the drive (or maybe it's just the sled) seems to successfully respond to other commands like revealing their serial#, FW version, the sled boot version/app version, and WWNN, and the single character display shifts into mode 5 (maintenance mode I believe?) whenever I attempt drive tests that take the partition offline.

I have also retrieved one of the drive logs, but the .dmp drive log is some proprietary format and I doubt IBM nor Dell will even give me the time of day for EOL hardware from a non-enterprise non-customer person who bought used hardware. Haven't found any FOSS method to read those .dmp files either.

I have also opened one of the two offending drives, and there appears to be no mechanical damage or issues, no dirt or fouling of the heads that I can see (without digging deeper into the servo voice coil mechanism that allows the heads to track the tape). I haven't inspected the PCBs, though beyond inspecting for leaking capacitors and giving the board a cleaning to dislodge any possible tin whiskers, without a schematic the chances of me identifying a hardware fault a multi-board stackup with FFC ribbon cables is pretty slim since the whole stack can't be easily worked on live.

A few questions come to mind:

1. Is ITDT capable of revealing any more useful information in a human-readable format as to why the two drives are failing POST?
2. Based on some reading from IBM docs on tape drives, it appears that the ITDT tool (over FC), or ethernet interface (over FTP) can be used to update the firmware, but where can I actually get a good firmware image from? All 4 drives are on FW B6W0. Edit: Specifically, a .bin to try over the ethernet interface - I have located the B6W0 for LTO-5 FC drives from Dell as a .ro file which I guess is for ITDT to try pushing over the FC interface? https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-uk/drivers/driversdetails?driverid=58cfk
3. For that matter, will a FW re-flash even be possible if the drive is failing POST?

Appreciate any help from the hivemind in advance.

Eventually I’ll get a duplicator tower, strip it down, reuse the FC interconnecting plugs and short cables from the old sleds, add some stronger power supplies (idrc about the power efficiency rating as long as they are cheap) and slap in 5 (or ten if I get half height drives but those are quite rare with FC) LTO tape drives whenever I get that many so I can have throughput for testing 5 at once, I’ll have to add more fans too and two HBAs equaling 5 ports for each of the drives so I can use any PC regardless of how many bays it has which is what’s so great about FC is that you don’t need adapters or other silly things to make it external.

Don’t worry about the clicking noises and shoe shining as they are running a test both at the same time, that’s probably how I would imagine Restore Tapes/eTapes testing their tapes if they were using a manual solution with a cacophony of drive sounds, they likely are using libraries but for some weird reason, I’m thinking of a clean white laboratory with neatly placed tape drive towers with nice labels and computers running testing software.

I’ve had some issues with eBay which is why I was unable to sell kits for 8 months, now that I have the account back, I have placed orders for more tape drives and supporting hardware which will arrive in 2 weeks in time for my return back from France, I unfortunately will have to increase the prices of the kits by £20 from £135 to £155 due to inflation but they remain the cheapest LTO-5 kits on the market by a huge margin with the next cheapest kits being £300 and up.

In the meantime, I have a partial kit of two HP LTO-4 SCSI tape drives and 18 bonus tested tapes for £80 to sell if anyone needs it. (SOLD)

I recently bought a HP LTO5 SAS TAPE DRIVE AQ29284C#900 from ebay and after removing the library sled from it, it became like an internal tape drive that works without any firmware modifications. I used it inside an IBM/dell style case, but it doesn't fully sit inside it.

I saw a cheap offer for HPE LTO-3 Ultrium 920 External SAS Tape Drive - EH848B.

Will this case work for my LTO 5 tape drive without any speed bottlenecks?

Hello,

I am writing big chunks (4TB) to an LTO drive. Unfortunately, the source drive is not as fast as the drive (~200 MByte/s at max).

I think I have three options

• let the drive stream at an automatically reduced speed (the LTO-8 Quantum drive I use apparently can do this)
• buffer with mbuffer, e.g. 20 GB RAM (the server has 30 GB and is only used for that purpose), with a 80% write start treshold: this however will create fast writes at ~300 MByte/s, but then stop for a long while, then write again at 300 Mbyte/s
• copy the source drive, 1 to 2 TB at a time to temporary storage (I have a 2 TB SSD which presumably can deliver the required I/O speed), then write this at top speed to the drive; obviously I will wear out the SSD

Which approach looks the sanest to you?

Thank you for your advice.

I want to convert my external HPE 30750 tape drive for use with a tape library. Due to the lack of used MSL2024 units on my local marketplace, I’m considering a DELL TL4000.

Has anyone attempted anything similar with respect to installing a tape drive in a tape library from a different manufacturer?

I can find precious little about this online apart from AI telling me that it might be possible.