Looking for PCI express SCSI diff card recommendations

[Kenneth D. Merry]

On Mon, Jan 14, 2019 at 09:26:31 -0500, Kevin P. Neal wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 14, 2019 at 09:10:43AM -0500, Ken Merry wrote:
> > If you want to use LTFS on FreeBSD, I ported IBM???s LTFS to FreeBSD:
> > 
> > https://github.com/LinearTapeFileSystem/ltfs <https://github.com/LinearTapeFileSystem/ltfs>
> 
> Any chance of that getting merged into the FreeBSD repo and becoming
> officially supported?

It would probably make the most sense to put it in the ports tree.  It is a
FUSE-based filesystem, and therefore easily installable as a port.  Making
it a port would also make it easier to keep up to date with IBM's
development.  (It is under active development.)

As far as putting it in the base system, I think it is something that will
get used as a standalone filesystem fairly infrequently.  Very few people
will have an IBM LTO-5 or newer drive / library.  And most people shelling
out the money for any amount of tape are either going to run a backup
package or archive package on it, not just LTFS by itself.

So, with stock FreeBSD, you would most likely run Bacula or Amanda for
backup usage.  I'm not sure if there are commercial backup packages with
FreeBSD support.  If you want a commercial FreeBSD-based archive product
that will manage your tape library and do a lot more:

https://spectralogic.com/products/blackpearl/

BlackPearl uses LTFS as its tape storage format, so that even if you want
to switch to something else later on, you aren't "stuck" with a proprietary
tape format.  It can also import other vendors' LTFS-formatted tapes,
assuming they follow the standard...

If someone would like to make a port out of LTFS, that's fine with me...
(Just a little busy with other stuff right now, and I'm not a ports
committer.)

Ken
-- 
Kenneth Merry
ken at FreeBSD.ORG