README.md

LTO Info Tool

This tool reads the internal memory of LTO/Ultrium cartridges from a tape drive 🖭

More precisely, this tool can:

• Read, decode and display factory and usage information stored in the Cartridge Memory (CM) aka Medium Auxiliary Memory (MAM)
• View and modify the custom User Medium Text Label of a cartridge
• Display basic information about the tape drive device

🔨 How to build and use

You need to have a go build environment properly set up, then just type:

make

And try the tool by typing:

./lto-info

By default, the tool will look for a tape device in /dev/nst0, or what is pointed to by the TAPE environment variable. To specify another device, use the -d option.

🔍 Output example

Drive information:
   Vendor  : HP
   Model   : Ultrium 2-SCSI
   Firmware: F63D
Medium information:
  Cartridge Type: 0x00 - Data cartridge
  Medium format : 0x42 - LTO-2
  Formatted as  : 0x42 - LTO-2
  Assign. Org.  : LTO-CVE
  Manufacturer  : IMATION
  Serial No     : 0E00776390
  Manuf. Date   : 2011-12-07 (roughly 9.4 years ago)
  Tape length   : 609 meters
  Tape width    : 12.7 mm
  MAM Capacity  : 4096 bytes (1014 bytes remaining)
Format specs:
   Capacity  :   200 GB native   -   400 GB compressed with a 2:1 ratio
   R/W Speed :    40 MB/s native -    80 MB/s compressed
   Partitions:     1 max partitions supported
   Phy. specs: 4 bands/tape, 16 wraps/band, 8 tracks/wrap, 512 total tracks
   Duration  : 1h23 to fill tape with 64 end-to-end passes (78 seconds/pass)
Usage information:
  Partition space free  : 96% (193746/200448 MiB, 189/195 GiB, 0.18/0.19 TiB)
  Cartridge load count  : 13
  Data written - alltime:        81983 MiB (    80.06 GiB,   0.08 TiB, 0.41 FVE)
  Data read    - alltime:        20674 MiB (    20.19 GiB,   0.02 TiB, 0.10 FVE)
  Data written - session:            0 MiB (     0.00 GiB,   0.00 TiB, 0.00 FVE)
  Data read    - session:          139 MiB (     0.14 GiB,   0.00 TiB, 0.00 FVE)
Previous sessions:
  Session N-0: Used in a device of vendor HP (serial HU10625W0T)
  Session N-1: Used in a device of vendor HP (serial HU10625W0T)
  Session N-2: Used in a device of vendor HP (serial HUP9B067QF)
  Session N-3: Used in a device of vendor HP (serial HUP9B067QF)

💎 Build-time dependencies

• https://github.com/HewlettPackard/structex: encode/decode bitfields in SCSI structs in a readable way
• https://github.com/benmcclelland/mtio: go bindings for mt ioctls
• https://github.com/benmcclelland/sgio: go bindings for sgio ioctls
• https://github.com/jessevdk/go-flags: command-line options parser

♥️ Thanks

Inspired from other tools written in C:

• https://github.com/arogge/maminfo
• https://github.com/scangeo/lto-cm/

Big up to them!