> If you’re saving on the order of a hundred dollars per tape (12TB), you’re going to have enough left over for a few readers. That's a good point, and it cert

> If you’re saving on the order of a hundred dollars per tape (12TB), you’re going to have enough left over for a few readers. That's a good point, and it certainly improves the attractiveness of tape overall. Still, a $200 saving in medium doesn't make up for a $2600 difference in drive cost. How well does it improve the appeal of tape for parallelism? The media+drive cost of LTO-8 for 12TB would be around $2850, while for disk is only $550. Considering LTO-8 has transfer speeds of 1.6x or so that of disks, that means only 5 tape units are needed to match 8 disks. That's still $14.2k compared to $4.4k, over 3x. (With disks, I'd want to do RAID6 or RAID-Z3 at the very least [1], which further reduces that ratio, but not below 2x). That's certainly much closer to parity than an off-the-cuff estimate, but it's still not close enough to be practical. Anyone needing to transfer data in bulk, fast, would still do well to choose disks, not tape. > this is a silly argument. I think we actually agree on all of this and we’re talking about an extreme hypothetical I disagree as to silliness, and as to argument, since I also think we generally agree. This is a discussion in the spirit of HN, satisfying intellectual curiosity. I also disagree that it represents an extreme hypothetical. I believe your own anecdote is nowhere near as rare as you imply. Even at lesser scale, it's an issue: the existence of the AWS Snowball is a testament to that. [1] Ideally true sector-level ECC, though AFAIK, ZFS can provide a close enough approximation