4 ms·

"But there's something else that tape offers that no other storage medium currently offers and that's on-the-fly, transparent compression which can go up to 2.5

• apolog 7y ago
  Not an expert here, but could it be because you can actually slow down the tape 2,5x and still be readable?
• makapuf 7y ago
  I think what is unique here could be the "on-the-fly, transparent". But this kind of compression can be better achieved I think with one core of your CPU, plaintext compression of 3x shouldn't need lzma (and if you really need to compress 22TB of plain text with no binary or multimedia files, well maybe you could compress it slightly with lz4 or a simple zlib compression before sending it).
• tenebrisalietum 7y ago
  Lots of tape drives offer built-in compression. The drive firmware does it. On AIT3 drives you can enable or disable it. Compression may have been a big deal in the ages of sub-1Ghz single core systems but not anymore. Especially since you ought to be encrypting before writing anyway. Why does it continue? Probably so they can double the capacity that they put on the tape label, which is always the compressed capacity and not the native or real capacity. Plus backward compatible with such encoded tapes.
• Spooky23 7y ago
  People are very conservative about backup, and some backup solutions don’t compress in software.