On 11/07/2012 07:49 PM, Tim Mooney wrote:

In regard to: [Networker] Is it possible to mix LTO-4 and LTO-5 drives
?,...:

Thanks a lot for your replies. I'm now realising there is no sense to
mix the type of drives. I will have a look to the feasibilty to replace
all my drives by LTO-5 but I will probalby wait for one year more to buy
LTO-6...

That's a wise choice.  Although a mixed-drive library can be made to work,
it's a pain and not really for the faint of heart.  We did it only as a
transition method, where we weren't trying to write to both types of drives
at the same time.

One thing you might consider is seeing if your vendor will do drive "trade
ins".  If you can afford 2 LTO 5 drives now, maybe your vendor will take
your 4 LTO 4 drives in trade for 2 more LTO 5 plus some tapes.  That
provides a fairly easy transition path.

Note that LTO6 is still prohibitively expensive and won't be able to read
LTO4 media anyway, but it is also a possibility.  You would need to keep
one of your LTO4 drives around for reading until your retention expired
on current media, but you could mark all the LTO4 media as read-only and
mark that drive as read-only, so it wouldn't cause problems for the LTO6
media and drives.

Tim

--

-- Yaron.