I got an LTO 5 Tape drive for free and I want to use to to to a bulk back up of my NAS. It's an IBM 46X6073 and I believe it was part of a library. I have a SAS HBA and the cable to connect them. I got it to power on, but that's as far as I got. It will accept a tape, but it spits it back out after a minute.
Will this tape drive work in a standalone configuation like this? If so, what is the recommended software to use with it?
I've been debating this as well and I decided to go with H.255 since AV1 decoding hardware is years out for any client devices that access Plex. I am going to use Handbrake CLI in Linux to run the conversion of all of my media for space savings. I am using the Super HQ present with audio passthrough for all resolution ranges (except 4K).
I have about 18TB of media to churn though and I don't want it taking a all winter or tying up my desktop/server for that duration. My plan is to distribute the transcoding tasks across a SLURM compute cluster I built out of old Dell desktops. Need to do the math on how long it might take, but I have a 8 thread/8GB VMs living on all PCs in the house as nodes for the cluster which totals 14. I wrote a couple python scripts to create the transcode jobs, run them and handle file movement.
I'm thinking I will see about 50% storage savings on all transcoded media. If you want more details or the scripts, let me know and I will put them on GitHub.