The tape drive finally works!

I’m sure many of you remember my post called “The Tape Library Salvage Score!” (if you don’t, just scroll down the home page and you’ll see it). Anyway, In that post I talked about how I got 2 LTO Ultrium tape drives, a LTO 3 drive and a LTO 4 drive. The LTO 3 drive was broken and had the orange cleaning tape shown above stuck in it. I have taken apart and salvaged the LTO 3 drive, but I still have the working LTO 4 drive. For a while now I have wanted to back up my servers (I say this like I have many servers, but the truth is I only have two) on tape. The problem is my tape drive has SFP ports (read up!) on the back, limiting my options to doing an optical connection to my server, or just using an SFP cable. Sadly, as far as I know no servers or computers come with SFP or optical ports on the back, meaning you need to get a SFP/optical card for your server. Let me tell you, those are WAY overpriced for what they are. I’m never going to spend $300 on a little circuit board that will go in the back of my server. Since I had 5 boxed tapes and a drive, I tried (with no success) to sell them on eBay. to so I could get a couple hundred dollars (yeah, that much. Tape media is way overpriced) I could spend on something else.

Later my dad (he works in the IT department of a architecture firm) got the news that he and his other employees had to move out of there private room and go to some office cubicles in an old meeting area. Since they were downsizing, they need to get rid of a lot of stuff. And yes, this is the place I got the tape library. It just happened to be that they had a optical card sitting around that they were getting rid of. So he brought that home, and I shoved it into my server, took the tape drive and tapes out of their sad bubble-wrapped box, ripped off the “Thank you for purchasing” eBay stickers and ran downstairs with them. I did have to downgrade my server from Windows Server 2012 R2 to Windows Server 2008 Standard for it to work, but it worked. I could finally back up my stuff to tape. I will also build a case for the tape drive, because it’s an internal drive and has all it’s parts exposed. Also I have to have a whole separate ATX power supply to run it.