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Tape drives are generally SAS so you will need a controller card

I've got a HP StorageWorks Ultrium 3000 drive (It's LTO-5 format) connected to one (LSI SAS SAS9300-4i), in my NAS/file server (HP Z420 workstation chassis). Don't go lower than LTO-5 as you will want LTFS support.

About £150 all in for the card and drive (including SFF-8643 to SFF-8482 cables etc..) on EBay

Tapes are 1.5TB uncompressed, and about £10/each on Ebay, you'll also want to pick up a cleaning cartridge.

I use this and RDX (1TB cartridges are 2-4 times the price, but drives are a lot cheaper, and SATA/USB3, and you can use them like a disk) for offline backup of stuff at home.


Not OP, but similar situation, trying to figure out tape archiving, already using SAS.

However, is there no open formats? The whole LTO ecosystem of course reeks of enterprise, and I'd expect by now at least one hardware hacker had picked together some off-the-shelf components to build something that is magnitude cheaper to acquire, maintain and upgrade.


Short answer: no

Tape is really complicated and physically challenging, and there are no incentives for people investing insane amounts of time for something that has almost no fan base. See the blog post about why you don’t want tape from some time ago.

Edit: https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/lto-tape-backups-for-linux-n...


> there are no incentives for people investing insane amounts of time for something that has almost no fan base

Like that has stopped anyone before? :p Probably explain why we haven't seen anything FOSS in that ecosystem yet though.


The LTO cartridges are cheap and the programs that you need for using LTO tape drives are open source.

The only problem is that the LTO tape drives are very expensive. If you want to use 18 TB LTO-9 tapes, the cost per TB is much lower than for HDDs, but you need to store at least a few hundred TB in order to recover the cost of the tape drive.

There is no chance to see less expensive tape drives because there is no competition and it would be extremely difficult for anyone to become a competitor as it is difficult to become able to design and manufacture the mechanical parts of the drive and the reading and writing magnetic heads.


when I worked in the embedded software industry long ago, I spent lots and lots of time connecting over serial ports to dev boards, using software like Minicom. Being able to do that in screen itself would be neat. Tmux does it.


Screen does connect to serial ports. Just open the device and append the line parameters you want to run on the port. Unlike modem dialers like Minicom, you don't have to screw around with on-hook off-hook distinctions or an intrusive TUI.


Ha, I have only ever used screen for serial comms and only learned about Minicom from this thread


Exactly the other way around for me! I've been using screen since forever, and had no idea it could do that. Minicom I still know from the dialup dark ages.


When I worked with embedded systems, I used both, and didn't really understand the differences and nuances between them, and now I wish I did.


Was common with AMD CPUs in the past, the Ryzen 1000 range had a widespread problem where many made in 2017 would randomly segfault from time to time under Linux, it was a whole drama, and you had to RMA them until you got lucky.


Probably lots, my first Palm was a TX in 2006, and I remember it was ~£300. I used it with a IBM T60 which was was I recall £1200+

I had an IBM R30 before that in ~2000 and recall it being ~£1500 as well.

Laptops weren't cheap!


In real morse messages, you aren't always sending full words, most of the time you are sending prosigns (abbreviations) - Think like early SMS chat. "DE" means this is, you hand over with a "K", "SK" means you are going offline, "HIHI" is like LOL, "XYL" means significant other, etc...

Things like Q get used a lot in Morse for example (look up Q-Codes) compared to real English.

So, traditional letter frequencies are not applicable (Also because the code itself is language-agnostic)

Using a tree like this to decodee also sucks from a speed perspective. You need to learn the sounds /not/ count the dits/dahs if you want to get a good word per minute.

source: radio ham who knows morse and can do 20+ wpm.

A lot of weird stuff in morse and things also comes from older comms methods like Semaphore - The reason we have M in Scottish callsigns for ham radio is because M is the saltire (Scottish flag) symbol in Sempahore, for example.


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