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The prices are much cheaper now. You can get a single tape drive for under $300 and enterprise grade single tape drives for under $3k. https://www.newegg.com/p

The prices are much cheaper now. You can get a single tape drive for under $300 and enterprise grade single tape drives for under $3k. https://www.newegg.com/p/2BM-000A-000M5 https://www.newegg.com/p/2BM-000A-000M5 https://www.provantage.com/quantum-tc-l72an-br~7QUAT0JW.htm https://www.provantage.com/quantum-tc-l72an-br~7QUAT0JW.htm

monocasa 6y ago
That $300 drive is an LTO-2 drive. It's so old that it's parallel SCSI. I'd be surprised if you could even get tapes for it that aren't sketch grey market stuff that you wouldn't want to use for backups anyway.
- segfaultbuserr 6y ago
  One day I found a really cheap LTO-4 drive that costed $150. Interesting, but I found it was not practical despite the price and decided against it. First, an 800 GB LTO-4 tape is no longer high density by today's standard, it couldn't even hold a 1 TB HDD image, also, I still had to pay for the necessary SAS peripherals to get it working, finally, the mechanical assembly inside a 10-year-old tape drive was not something that inspires confidence for data backup... Last time I've looked up, the cheapest decommissioned LTO-5 drive still costs $1000.
prirun 6y ago
The first tape drive is a 200GB (native / uncompessed) internal SCSI drive. Not so easy for a consumer with a laptop to use. The tapes are pretty cheap at $8 on Amazon if you buy 20.
- weare138 6y ago
  Well they don't really make these things for laptops unfortunately but they also don't cost $25k+ like they used to. It's still more than the average consumer is willing to spend but they are affordable enough now to be a viable option for professionals and small businesses.
ardy42 6y ago
> The prices are much cheaper now. You can get a single tape drive for under $300 and enterprise grade single tape drives for under $3k. Those tapes only hold 200 GB, and you can get a 10 TB hard drive today for less than $300: https://www.newegg.com/red-wd101efax-10tb/p/N82E16822234407 https://www.newegg.com/red-wd101efax-10tb/p/N82E16822234407 While tapes are theoretically cool, the the drives are just too rare for them to be of any practical value to a home user. Even if the media has a better archival life than a hard disk (say 50 years), it won't do you a damn bit of good if there are no drives available in 50 years to read it. IMHO, hard drives are better for backup (even offline backup, just get a hot-swap bay and imagine the drive is tape [1]). Archival is a harder problem, but I've settled on using high-grade optical media, burned slow for fewer errors, making a bunch of redundant copies. Even though the media might not last as long, I'm pretty much guaranteed to be able to find a drive for the next several decades [2]. [1] "pretend this hard drive is a tape" is even an enterprise product: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RDX_Technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RDX_Technology [2] For instance, you can still attach a 5.25 floppy drive to a modern computer: https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=5.25+floppy+drive https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=5.25+floppy+drive + http://www.deviceside.com/fc5025.html http://www.deviceside.com/fc5025.html
- klodolph 6y ago
  > Those tapes only hold 200 GB, and you can get a 10 TB hard drive today for less than $300: That was a link to an obsolete LTO-2 drive. If you’re using LTO-8, which is the current generation, you’d get a 10-pack of 12TB tapes for around $500. Noticeably cheaper per byte than hard drives. I don’t recommend LTO-2 just because I don’t think that the drives are well-supported. > While tapes are theoretically cool, the the drives are just too rare for them to be of any practical value to a home user. Even if the media has a better archival life than a hard disk (say 50 years), it won't do you a damn bit of good if there are no drives available in 50 years to read it. If you’re evaluating just on the basis of the price of drives / media, then there’s a cutoff where tape becomes cheaper than hard drives. The easy way to calculate this cutoff is to divide the overhead cost (tape drive price) by the difference in the cost per TB of tapes and hard drives, which in the example here, is around $3k divided by $25/TB, or 120 TB. In other words, if you have more than about 120 TB of data, then it is cheaper to buy a tape drive. I think any comments about whether tape drives are suitable for home use are really comments about whether you are interested in the use case of people who need to store >120 TB at home. If you are running a YouTube channel as a hobby, or you run a side business doing videography for weddings, the tape drive starts to sound a lot better. The 120 TB cutoff might be around 300 hours of video, which might be only 50 events. There are a lot of other reasons why you might NOT want to use tape, but it’s easy to have enough data that tape is the cheapest storage option. At “enterprise” scale the cost calculus is completely different and involves things like support contracts with Oracle (not necessary for hard drives), power/cooling in your DC (tape is very low-power), etc. And let’s not forget that if you have 120TB of hard drives, you’re in the regime where you start having to buy multiple machines. As for longetivity—I don’t have the data handy. If you are storing data on tape, you need to migrate to newer generations of tape, as old generations become obsolete and unavailable. If you are storing on hard disks, you also need to migrate because hard disks eventually fail (even if they are not powered on).

monocasa 6y ago

That $300 drive is an LTO-2 drive. It's so old that it's parallel SCSI. I'd be surprised if you could even get tapes for it that aren't sketch grey market stuff that you wouldn't want to use for backups anyway.

segfaultbuserr 6y ago
One day I found a really cheap LTO-4 drive that costed $150. Interesting, but I found it was not practical despite the price and decided against it. First, an 800 GB LTO-4 tape is no longer high density by today's standard, it couldn't even hold a 1 TB HDD image, also, I still had to pay for the necessary SAS peripherals to get it working, finally, the mechanical assembly inside a 10-year-old tape drive was not something that inspires confidence for data backup... Last time I've looked up, the cheapest decommissioned LTO-5 drive still costs $1000.

prirun 6y ago

The first tape drive is a 200GB (native / uncompessed) internal SCSI drive. Not so easy for a consumer with a laptop to use. The tapes are pretty cheap at $8 on Amazon if you buy 20.

weare138 6y ago
Well they don't really make these things for laptops unfortunately but they also don't cost $25k+ like they used to. It's still more than the average consumer is willing to spend but they are affordable enough now to be a viable option for professionals and small businesses.

ardy42 6y ago

> The prices are much cheaper now. You can get a single tape drive for under $300 and enterprise grade single tape drives for under $3k. Those tapes only hold 200 GB, and you can get a 10 TB hard drive today for less than $300: https://www.newegg.com/red-wd101efax-10tb/p/N82E16822234407 https://www.newegg.com/red-wd101efax-10tb/p/N82E16822234407 While tapes are theoretically cool, the the drives are just too rare for them to be of any practical value to a home user. Even if the media has a better archival life than a hard disk (say 50 years), it won't do you a damn bit of good if there are no drives available in 50 years to read it. IMHO, hard drives are better for backup (even offline backup, just get a hot-swap bay and imagine the drive is tape [1]). Archival is a harder problem, but I've settled on using high-grade optical media, burned slow for fewer errors, making a bunch of redundant copies. Even though the media might not last as long, I'm pretty much guaranteed to be able to find a drive for the next several decades [2]. [1] "pretend this hard drive is a tape" is even an enterprise product: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RDX_Technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RDX_Technology [2] For instance, you can still attach a 5.25 floppy drive to a modern computer: https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=5.25+floppy+drive https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=5.25+floppy+drive + http://www.deviceside.com/fc5025.html http://www.deviceside.com/fc5025.html

klodolph 6y ago
> Those tapes only hold 200 GB, and you can get a 10 TB hard drive today for less than $300: That was a link to an obsolete LTO-2 drive. If you’re using LTO-8, which is the current generation, you’d get a 10-pack of 12TB tapes for around $500. Noticeably cheaper per byte than hard drives. I don’t recommend LTO-2 just because I don’t think that the drives are well-supported. > While tapes are theoretically cool, the the drives are just too rare for them to be of any practical value to a home user. Even if the media has a better archival life than a hard disk (say 50 years), it won't do you a damn bit of good if there are no drives available in 50 years to read it. If you’re evaluating just on the basis of the price of drives / media, then there’s a cutoff where tape becomes cheaper than hard drives. The easy way to calculate this cutoff is to divide the overhead cost (tape drive price) by the difference in the cost per TB of tapes and hard drives, which in the example here, is around $3k divided by $25/TB, or 120 TB. In other words, if you have more than about 120 TB of data, then it is cheaper to buy a tape drive. I think any comments about whether tape drives are suitable for home use are really comments about whether you are interested in the use case of people who need to store >120 TB at home. If you are running a YouTube channel as a hobby, or you run a side business doing videography for weddings, the tape drive starts to sound a lot better. The 120 TB cutoff might be around 300 hours of video, which might be only 50 events. There are a lot of other reasons why you might NOT want to use tape, but it’s easy to have enough data that tape is the cheapest storage option. At “enterprise” scale the cost calculus is completely different and involves things like support contracts with Oracle (not necessary for hard drives), power/cooling in your DC (tape is very low-power), etc. And let’s not forget that if you have 120TB of hard drives, you’re in the regime where you start having to buy multiple machines. As for longetivity—I don’t have the data handy. If you are storing data on tape, you need to migrate to newer generations of tape, as old generations become obsolete and unavailable. If you are storing on hard disks, you also need to migrate because hard disks eventually fail (even if they are not powered on).