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That's all well and good, but tapes are smaller than disks. LTO-8 is 12TB and the 14TB disks have been out for a good while. Also with inefficient tapes you e
by sliken 7y ago
That's all well and good, but tapes are smaller than disks. LTO-8 is 12TB and the 14TB disks have been out for a good while.
Also with inefficient tapes you end up spending many more tapes for inefficient incrementals, incredibly long seeks, and lack of efficient deduplication.
Then there's other nasty surprises like a relatively narrow temperature range for tapes and an improper alignment of the head can result in tapes you can read and write... but when the drive dies you can't read the tapes anywhere else.
Tapes still make sense above a certainly scale, but I think it's around 10PB before the real world costs of tapes, drives, robot, support agreements, extra capacity for inefficient incrementals/dedupe, etc.
The big win with tapes is it's much more feasible to rotate tapes offsite.
- adrian_b 7y ago> but tapes are smaller than disks Tapes are also physically smaller, therfore their capacity per volume is better than for HDDs. Two LTO Ultrium catridges have about the same volume as a 3.5" HDDs, so you have 24 TB in the same space as a 14 TB HDD. Moreover, the HDDs are much heavier. You can easily carry a suitcase with 20 tape cartridges, i.e. with 240 TB. If you would carry a suitcase with 17 HDDs (238 TB), that would be around 14 kg (around 31 lbs). Possible but not at all comfortable.