4 ms·

> 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

> 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.

4 ms·

> 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

by klodolph 7y ago

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.