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Is Tape worth it for a movie collection? I don’t think I will see any benefits of the compression and the prices seem comparable to just buying a 8TB HD

klodolph 7y ago
> Is Tape worth it for a movie collection? I doubt your movie collection is large enough that tape would be cheaper. A single tape has about ~50x the capacity of a Blu-ray Disc, but you need to buy a lot of tapes before the whole setup becomes cheaper than HDD. > I don’t think I will see any benefits of the compression… Ignore the compression, it’s garbage. > …the prices seem comparable to just buying a 8TB HD… By “comparable”… tape is clearly cheaper per byte when you compare prices, it’s just not so radically cheaper that it changes your life.
- adrian_b 7y ago
  The most common tape is LTO-7, which is 6 TB (non-compressed). The most common Blu-ray disks store 50 GB, so a tape equals 120 discs, not 50. I have mentioned in another message that the breaking point is around 75 TB or around 50 TB, depending on how many copies you store, i.e. around 1000 to 1500 Blu-ray movies. I agree that many people, probably most people, do not need to store so much data to make tape storage economical, but for those who have a large enough data archive, like myself, the tape is really radically cheaper to have changed my life. Obviously, there is a vicious circle, few people buy tape drives because they are too expensive, so that tape drives are expensive because few of them are sold. If they would have been mass produced, tape drives should have been 5 to 10 times cheaper, and then tape archives would have made sense even for the smallest movie collections.
  - klodolph 7y ago
    > The most common tape is LTO-7, which is 6 TB (non-compressed). The most common Blu-ray disks store 50 GB, so a tape equals 120 discs, not 50. I was being conservative and using BD XL. Seems like you came to the same conclusion about the break-even point—around 150TB before you consider replication.
adrian_b 7y ago
Tape (LTO-7) costs 3 times less than the cheapest HDDs, so the prices are not comparable at all. To recover the drive + SAS HBA card costs, the movie collection must be larger than about 75 TB if you store double copies or larger than about 50 TB if you store triple copies. If you store a single copy of any digital medium, the chances to not lose anything after many years are negligible.
- adrian_b 7y ago
  I forgot to mention that I referred to the prices for non-compressed tape storage, i.e. counting LTO-7 tapes as 6 TB tapes. Compression does not work for movies and even for compressible data I disable the tape compression and I use better compression algorithms on the computer.
- magicalhippo 7y ago
  Here the LTO-7 is only half as cheap as a HDD, ~110 USD for 6TB tape vs ~230 USD for 8TB HDD (cheaper per GB than 6TB models). Cheapest new LTO-7 drive is over 3000 USD though, which means you'd need more than 300TB of data for a new LTO-7 tape solution to be cheaper here.
  - adrian_b 7y ago
    110 USD is extremely expensive. In Europe, at Amazon, the price is 60 EUR, including sale taxes, for a 6 TB tape from IBM, Quantum, HP or Fuji. Looking at Amazon USA (just search LTO-7), I see prices between USD 63 and USD 69, or even just $60 per cartridge if you buy a 10-pack. That is still more expensive than where I buy, but it is nevertheless far closer to 3 times less than HDDs than to 2 times less than HDDs.
    - magicalhippo 7y ago
      Could be there are cheaper ones, and this was single pack, maybe the 20 pack is cheaper still. Though again, with the cost of the drive you need quite a lot of data for it to make sense.

klodolph 7y ago

> Is Tape worth it for a movie collection? I doubt your movie collection is large enough that tape would be cheaper. A single tape has about ~50x the capacity of a Blu-ray Disc, but you need to buy a lot of tapes before the whole setup becomes cheaper than HDD. > I don’t think I will see any benefits of the compression… Ignore the compression, it’s garbage. > …the prices seem comparable to just buying a 8TB HD… By “comparable”… tape is clearly cheaper per byte when you compare prices, it’s just not so radically cheaper that it changes your life.

adrian_b 7y ago
The most common tape is LTO-7, which is 6 TB (non-compressed). The most common Blu-ray disks store 50 GB, so a tape equals 120 discs, not 50. I have mentioned in another message that the breaking point is around 75 TB or around 50 TB, depending on how many copies you store, i.e. around 1000 to 1500 Blu-ray movies. I agree that many people, probably most people, do not need to store so much data to make tape storage economical, but for those who have a large enough data archive, like myself, the tape is really radically cheaper to have changed my life. Obviously, there is a vicious circle, few people buy tape drives because they are too expensive, so that tape drives are expensive because few of them are sold. If they would have been mass produced, tape drives should have been 5 to 10 times cheaper, and then tape archives would have made sense even for the smallest movie collections.
- klodolph 7y ago
  > The most common tape is LTO-7, which is 6 TB (non-compressed). The most common Blu-ray disks store 50 GB, so a tape equals 120 discs, not 50. I was being conservative and using BD XL. Seems like you came to the same conclusion about the break-even point—around 150TB before you consider replication.

adrian_b 7y ago

Tape (LTO-7) costs 3 times less than the cheapest HDDs, so the prices are not comparable at all. To recover the drive + SAS HBA card costs, the movie collection must be larger than about 75 TB if you store double copies or larger than about 50 TB if you store triple copies. If you store a single copy of any digital medium, the chances to not lose anything after many years are negligible.

adrian_b 7y ago
I forgot to mention that I referred to the prices for non-compressed tape storage, i.e. counting LTO-7 tapes as 6 TB tapes. Compression does not work for movies and even for compressible data I disable the tape compression and I use better compression algorithms on the computer.
magicalhippo 7y ago
Here the LTO-7 is only half as cheap as a HDD, ~110 USD for 6TB tape vs ~230 USD for 8TB HDD (cheaper per GB than 6TB models). Cheapest new LTO-7 drive is over 3000 USD though, which means you'd need more than 300TB of data for a new LTO-7 tape solution to be cheaper here.
- adrian_b 7y ago
  110 USD is extremely expensive. In Europe, at Amazon, the price is 60 EUR, including sale taxes, for a 6 TB tape from IBM, Quantum, HP or Fuji. Looking at Amazon USA (just search LTO-7), I see prices between USD 63 and USD 69, or even just $60 per cartridge if you buy a 10-pack. That is still more expensive than where I buy, but it is nevertheless far closer to 3 times less than HDDs than to 2 times less than HDDs.
  - magicalhippo 7y ago
    Could be there are cheaper ones, and this was single pack, maybe the 20 pack is cheaper still. Though again, with the cost of the drive you need quite a lot of data for it to make sense.