3 ms·

Tapes are cheap. Tape drives are very expensive. I can buy 200TB of hard drives for about the price of an LTO-8 tape drive.

wazoox 6y ago
200 TB of LTO-6 : drive ~1500$ + ~50 to 80 20$ tapes = 2500 to 3100$ 200 TB of disk : 25 * ~150$ 8TB disks = 3750$ So not really. Tape is generally cheaper overall for any volume over 100 TB. The question is what you're storing and why. For archival, long conservation, tape is unbeatable. I recently opened a case of 32 2 TB drives shelved since 2010 or so. These are Hitachi Ultrastar drives, the more reliable drives by a large margin. However, 3 of these were dead. Non-running disk drives actually fail as much or even slightly more than running ones (I have hundreds such drives in machines running 24/7 for the past 10 to 12 years). OTOH I've restored 120 LTO-2 tapes from 2002 recently. only one had problems (but most of the data was readable in the end). Tape is a great offline storage medium. Disks aren't.
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  I wish there was a middle ground. A way I could archive around 10 TB for around $500. I'm basically stuck with using hard drives + frequent backups and ZFS scrubs. Which isn't such a bad setup, but I'd like to have something offline. I've looked at M-Discs, but at ~$0.12 per gigabyte (for something completely non-rewritable), the price still isn't right.
- smileypete 6y ago
  >I recently opened a case of 32 2 TB drives shelved since 2010 or so. These are Hitachi Ultrastar drives, the more reliable drives by a large margin. However, 3 of these were dead. HDDs can get contaminated by siloxanes or hydrocarbon vapours, the former can come from adhesive tape and turn into abrasive SiO2 particles on the head. Only anecdata, but I used silicone 'covers' to protect a couple of backup HDDs in storage, and one failed within a year :( https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/trol/6/1/6_1_96/_pdf/-char/en https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/trol/6/1/6_1_96/_pdf/-c... Wonder if the helium filled drives would fare better in storage?
- lizknope 6y ago
  14TB drives were on sale for $200 recently. I picked up another 5. 15 drives * $200 = $3000 total 210TB I also said LTO-8 not LTO-6. I can manage 15 drives. LTO-6 is 2.5TB which would require 84 tapes to equal the 210TB of hard drives. 84 tapes is going to require tons of swapping. What is the price of an auto switching LTO-6 library? I would consider LTO-8 since it is 12TB per tape but those are going to be even more expensive.

wazoox 6y ago

200 TB of LTO-6 : drive ~1500$ + ~50 to 80 20$ tapes = 2500 to 3100$ 200 TB of disk : 25 * ~150$ 8TB disks = 3750$ So not really. Tape is generally cheaper overall for any volume over 100 TB. The question is what you're storing and why. For archival, long conservation, tape is unbeatable. I recently opened a case of 32 2 TB drives shelved since 2010 or so. These are Hitachi Ultrastar drives, the more reliable drives by a large margin. However, 3 of these were dead. Non-running disk drives actually fail as much or even slightly more than running ones (I have hundreds such drives in machines running 24/7 for the past 10 to 12 years). OTOH I've restored 120 LTO-2 tapes from 2002 recently. only one had problems (but most of the data was readable in the end). Tape is a great offline storage medium. Disks aren't.

Wowfunhappy 6y ago
I wish there was a middle ground. A way I could archive around 10 TB for around $500. I'm basically stuck with using hard drives + frequent backups and ZFS scrubs. Which isn't such a bad setup, but I'd like to have something offline. I've looked at M-Discs, but at ~$0.12 per gigabyte (for something completely non-rewritable), the price still isn't right.
smileypete 6y ago
>I recently opened a case of 32 2 TB drives shelved since 2010 or so. These are Hitachi Ultrastar drives, the more reliable drives by a large margin. However, 3 of these were dead. HDDs can get contaminated by siloxanes or hydrocarbon vapours, the former can come from adhesive tape and turn into abrasive SiO2 particles on the head. Only anecdata, but I used silicone 'covers' to protect a couple of backup HDDs in storage, and one failed within a year :( https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/trol/6/1/6_1_96/_pdf/-char/en https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/trol/6/1/6_1_96/_pdf/-c... Wonder if the helium filled drives would fare better in storage?
lizknope 6y ago
14TB drives were on sale for $200 recently. I picked up another 5. 15 drives * $200 = $3000 total 210TB I also said LTO-8 not LTO-6. I can manage 15 drives. LTO-6 is 2.5TB which would require 84 tapes to equal the 210TB of hard drives. 84 tapes is going to require tons of swapping. What is the price of an auto switching LTO-6 library? I would consider LTO-8 since it is 12TB per tape but those are going to be even more expensive.