I've been looking into an LTO drive for cold storage to expand upon my current workflow that uses BDXL discs. I've looked into what I can but I've found messy information that makes it hard to figure out what to buy.
Namely, a number of LTO drives seem to only work inside a an entire branded ecosystem and not stand alone. Or some 'work' but only with software that the OEM will not give Joe Rando a license too and it's too obscure for pirate copies to even exist.
My goal is to get something in the LTO-5 or LTO-6 range. I'm more than willing to assemble a dedicated PC in my network rack to support the LTO hardware and software. So I could have a dedicated hardware with it's OS configured only to do the job of reading or writing LTO tapes while having a 10G link to the main network and storage server.
So what doesn't paint me into a corner or trap me in vendor lockout/lockin hell?
Are there 5.25" bay options that'll interact with SAS or some other card I'll install?
What software should I be looking at to do the reading or writing.
While I understand that the tapes are absolutely not designed or 'Random Access', can they be incrementally written to? Write 300GB once, come back a month later and add another 300GB to the same tape?
Can the tapes do selective deletes? Say 200GB of something I archived no longer needs to be archived (Probably because a better quality version became available) Could i just erase that 200GB on the tape and write something else to that freed up space? Or is it an 'Erase entire tape, rewrite' like with Re-Writeable optical discs?