Our small team is considering buying our first tape drive for backups. However, we are still lacking serious enterprise-grade servers and have to rely temporarily on SATA drives in our rigs. Cost considerations argue against setting up a high-end automatic tapeloader, so our purchasing manager decided to go with a SAS tape drive (LTO 3 or LTO 4) to allow for migration to higher-end gear in the future.
What else do we need besides a SAS backplane and a reverse breakout cable to connect the tape drive to SATA bus on our boxes?
Best Answer
Connecting a SAS tape drive to a SATA port will not work.
They are different protocols. Here's a primer.
Can you provide information on the hardware involved?
If using an external SAS tape drive, you should use a dedicated and purpose-built SAS host bus adapter (HBA) with an external SAS SFF-8088 or SFF-8470 port.