1.8 KiB
LTO9 Optimizer
This is a simple Bash script to initialize/optimize LTO9 physical tapes.
The Problem
Enterprise LTO9 tapes are cool, but if you buy them in stocks of 1,000, or even 2,000, you potentially need weeks before using them. A single tape is held from 20 minutes up to 2 hours in the drive, and you cannot do anything but wait. This is the standard behavior from this LTO generation.
I find unnerving that enterprise tape libraries are sold without a feature to do this automatically, so I wrote this simple Bash script.
The Solution
Connect the Tape Library to a Linux server using SAS or FiberChannel (I only have tested FC), then run lsscsi -g | grep medium to get the special device of the changer, which will be something like /dev/sgX.
Then you can run the command:
optimizer.sh </dev/sgX> <parallelism>
Where 'parallelism' is a number, which can be equal to the number of the drives of the library/partition.
The script takes long pauses to avoid too many load/unload commands, so... be patient.
It has been tested with both:
- IBM TS4500 Tape Library
- Quantum i6000 Tape Library
Dependencies
The only package required is mtx.
Fun Facts
As far as I know, up to today, 4th of July, 2023, none of the major brands of Tape Libraries can provide a tool capable of this. I wrote the script in a day, then tested and fixed it.
Total time spent: 3 days.
Total money earned: none, so I'll just put it here.
Disclaimer
Please note that this script does not mean to replace any of the eventual official tools that may exist – but sadly I wasn't aware of.
P.S. I am aware the script is poorly written, but I don't have a test environment anymore to test it properly. I'll do it in my spare time.