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Every week without fail i see articles shilling tape storage. Do people realize only really Big Data benefits from tape? Unless you write multiple petabytes of

Every week without fail i see articles shilling tape storage. Do people realize only really Big Data benefits from tape? Unless you write multiple petabytes of data that you rarely need each day, tape is inferior in every way to hard disks. A huge corporation that counts every cent and needs lots of cold storage might benefit from tape, and companies still prefer better storage ( https://engineering.fb.com/core-data/under-the-hood-facebook-s-cold-storage-system/ https://engineering.fb.com/core-data/under-the-hood-facebook... ). "Good enough for Google, good enough for you"(a lie that neglects economies of scale that force Google to use tape). https://www.overlandstorage.com/blog/?p=323 https://www.overlandstorage.com/blog/?p=323

adrian_b 7y ago
No, tapes become preferable to HDDs at less than 100 TB written, not at multiple petabytes. For many applications and for many people, including for myself in my home, it makes absolutely no sense to use HDDs for anything, but only SSDs & tapes. For long term storage tape is superior in every way to HDDs, while for fast access SSDs are superior in every way to HDDs. Obviously, because the drives are extremely expensive, whoever needs no more than 20 or 30 TB of storage cannot afford tapes and must use a few HDDs. The best storage technology changes in time. 20 years ago I was using optical disks and 10 years ago I was using HDDs, but since I went back to tapes, like I was previously using 30 years ago, I have saved a lot of money and I have much less worries about the HDDs becoming defective.
- FrozenVoid 7y ago
  How does it compare with 8TB USB3 drives(140$)? https://pcpartpicker.com/product/YpJtt6/western-digital-elements-8tb-external-hard-drive-wdbwlg0080hbk-nesn https://pcpartpicker.com/product/YpJtt6/western-digital-elem...
  - adrian_b 7y ago
    LTO-7 tapes are $10 per TB at Amazon (of course uncompressed), so they are still cheaper, but this $17.50 USD per TB is indeed the cheapest HDD that I have ever seen. Nevertheless, these HDDs are much more expensive than they look at the first glance. The real cost of archival storage is given by the price per TB and per warranty year, because after the warranty time you must replace the storage medium. I have seen countless HDDs that have died just a few months after their warranty time expired. So these drives with 2-year warranty cost $8.75 per TB and per year. The warranty time of the tapes is 30 years, but in fact you must replace them much faster because you will no longer find tape drives able to read them. For LTO tapes, you should expect to replace them after 6 to 10 years. Even with only a 6 year lifetime, the price for tape would be $1.67 per TB per year, i.e. more than 5 times cheaper than those WD HDDs. If you want to just have some backups against accidents, which you expect to erase after a few weeks, then those HDDs could be a good choice. For archival purposes they are still much more expensive than tapes.
tapehead 7y ago
I can’t agree with your assertion that “tape is inferior in every way to hard disks”. Tape is cheaper per TB than HDD; why put data on more expensive media if you don’t have to. Tape is also more reliable by orders of magnitude than disk. You are more likely to be eaten by a shark than suffer an unrecoverable error using LTO-8. Tape is more durable and portable than disk. It also requires no power at rest and can be used to create an air gap to thwart cyber attack and malware. Finally, tape areal densities for tape are increasing far more quickly than for disk due to superparamagnetism, which makes tape far better suited to storing archive data in the IoT era of Big Data. Tape is less ideal if you have very stringent RTO or an application that needs fast random access to first byte. But in most cases, for its core strength of longer term data archiving, tape is better than disk or cloud (although as you note, the irony is that tape underpins major cloud vendor archive tiers). Don’t be absolutist; use the right storage, for the right purpose, at the right tape.

adrian_b 7y ago

No, tapes become preferable to HDDs at less than 100 TB written, not at multiple petabytes. For many applications and for many people, including for myself in my home, it makes absolutely no sense to use HDDs for anything, but only SSDs & tapes. For long term storage tape is superior in every way to HDDs, while for fast access SSDs are superior in every way to HDDs. Obviously, because the drives are extremely expensive, whoever needs no more than 20 or 30 TB of storage cannot afford tapes and must use a few HDDs. The best storage technology changes in time. 20 years ago I was using optical disks and 10 years ago I was using HDDs, but since I went back to tapes, like I was previously using 30 years ago, I have saved a lot of money and I have much less worries about the HDDs becoming defective.

FrozenVoid 7y ago
How does it compare with 8TB USB3 drives(140$)? https://pcpartpicker.com/product/YpJtt6/western-digital-elements-8tb-external-hard-drive-wdbwlg0080hbk-nesn https://pcpartpicker.com/product/YpJtt6/western-digital-elem...
- adrian_b 7y ago
  LTO-7 tapes are $10 per TB at Amazon (of course uncompressed), so they are still cheaper, but this $17.50 USD per TB is indeed the cheapest HDD that I have ever seen. Nevertheless, these HDDs are much more expensive than they look at the first glance. The real cost of archival storage is given by the price per TB and per warranty year, because after the warranty time you must replace the storage medium. I have seen countless HDDs that have died just a few months after their warranty time expired. So these drives with 2-year warranty cost $8.75 per TB and per year. The warranty time of the tapes is 30 years, but in fact you must replace them much faster because you will no longer find tape drives able to read them. For LTO tapes, you should expect to replace them after 6 to 10 years. Even with only a 6 year lifetime, the price for tape would be $1.67 per TB per year, i.e. more than 5 times cheaper than those WD HDDs. If you want to just have some backups against accidents, which you expect to erase after a few weeks, then those HDDs could be a good choice. For archival purposes they are still much more expensive than tapes.

tapehead 7y ago

I can’t agree with your assertion that “tape is inferior in every way to hard disks”. Tape is cheaper per TB than HDD; why put data on more expensive media if you don’t have to. Tape is also more reliable by orders of magnitude than disk. You are more likely to be eaten by a shark than suffer an unrecoverable error using LTO-8. Tape is more durable and portable than disk. It also requires no power at rest and can be used to create an air gap to thwart cyber attack and malware. Finally, tape areal densities for tape are increasing far more quickly than for disk due to superparamagnetism, which makes tape far better suited to storing archive data in the IoT era of Big Data. Tape is less ideal if you have very stringent RTO or an application that needs fast random access to first byte. But in most cases, for its core strength of longer term data archiving, tape is better than disk or cloud (although as you note, the irony is that tape underpins major cloud vendor archive tiers). Don’t be absolutist; use the right storage, for the right purpose, at the right tape.