VHS is dead. Long live VHS 2.0!
Tired of filling up your file server with endless hours of video content? You can relax now, because the brand new sparkling VHS 2.0 system has come to the rescue.
Each VHS 2.0 video cassette replaces 200 old E240 tapes, or about 800 hours of recording (more with "Long Play").
The VHS 2.0 cassettes in the picture to the left are of two different brands: Samsung (model HD204UI) and Seagate (model ST2000DL003).
The VHS 2.0 cassette adapter is a Deltaco SI-7908SUS which connects with ESATA to the VHS 2.0 file server.
At first I thought that Universal Disk Format would be the perfect choice of filesystem for the VHS 2.0 cassettes, but after discovering that the UDF driver in my current Linux kernel has a bug that prevents it from writing more than about 80GB of data, I decided to switch to HFS+ (the non-journaled, case sensitive variety) instead. This seems to work flawlessly on Linux, the filesystem behaves exactly* like any Unix filesystem. It also makes it easy to access the VHS 2.0 cassettes locally on a Macintosh, if desired. The only hitch is that they need to be formatted on a Mac at the moment, I couldn't find a 64-bit Linux port of Apple's diskdev_cmds that actually works for 2TB drives.
(*) Well, almost exactly. It turns out that HFS+ in Linux can't be NFS-exported, so for sharing one must use WebDAV or SFTP instead (or CIFS/Samba for the fearless). Also, HFS+ enforces normalization of filenames to Unicode canonical form NFD. This is actually a convenient feature when sharing files with a Mac, but it makes the filesystem less of a järnspett compared with traditional Unix filesystems.
