This is a simple Bash script to initialize/optimize LTO9 physical tapes.
⚠️ This repository is just a placeholder for more visibility. You can find the script on Gitea here
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.
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
The only package required is mtx.
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.
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.