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How does it compare with 8TB USB3 drives(140$)? https://pcpartpicker.com/product/YpJtt6/western-digital-elements-8tb-external-hard-drive-wdbwlg0080hbk-nesn http

• 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.