5 ms·

That's precisely what you need if you want to upload some backups from NAS systems or similar.

by est31 6y ago

monocasa 6y ago
$100 each starts making way less sense when they have the same semantics as a burned optical discs for home users. These days the main benefit to tape is the physical safety of having the media be inside a cartridge, and the streaming read speeds are stupid fast so you can reconstruct a backup faster. Home use, even with a data hoarder sized NAS, is better served with a bluray burner with multiple copies.
- est31 6y ago
  Storing even 5 TB of data onto bluray disks requires 100 disks of 50 GB dual layer capacity. That's a lot of disks.
  - webmobdev 6y ago
    Yeah. And that too if you are willing to ignore the really slow speed to write them all!
    - Karunamon 6y ago
      If you're doing archival storage, does the write speed really matter? If you have enough volume of incoming data where the write speed does matter, you've already eliminated most archival storage methods anyways.
      - webmobdev 6y ago
        True. But slow transfer speed is still a negative when we are comparing it to other archival methods (in this case, the tape drives). And that is why the demand for tape drives for consumers.
        Karunamon 6y ago
        I'm having a very difficult time understanding why they are a negative at all for most use cases. It's not like running a backup monopolizes the machine you're running it on. Again, tapes are for archival storage. Not nearline, not live, archival. As in, you write the data and likely don't come back to it for months to years.
  - dsego 6y ago
    There might be a benefit to it. If 1 disc corrupts you only loose 50GB. If your hard drive fails, you loose all 5TB at once.
- dragontamer 6y ago
  > $100 each starts making way less sense when they have the same semantics as a burned optical discs for home users. These tape-drives have 300MB/s+ of read/write speed. Sequential yes, but almost all backup tasks are sequential. Optical has 10MB/s or so. You get more out of a 100Mbps connection to (insert cloud storage provider here), let alone Gbps. At a minimum, a modern, reasonable mechanism for backups needs to be faster than cloud (100Mbps or Gbps), otherwise its basically worthless to the consumer. Hard drives and Tape get there, but there was no real way to improve Optical's read/write performance (outside of overengineered "jukebox" robots available to Facebook and a few other select groups), so it went fully obsolete.
  - monocasa 6y ago
    16x bluray is 72MB/s (576Mb/s).
    - dragontamer 6y ago
      Hard Drives are going 220MB/s and people still think they're too slow. I just gave a look at the first Blu Ray media on Newegg.com. Here's what is search #1: https://www.newegg.com/verbatim-6x-25gb-bd-r/p/N82E16817130156 https://www.newegg.com/verbatim-6x-25gb-bd-r/p/N82E168171301... That's 6x speed, or roughly 25MB/s. You can store 25GBs per disk and it is going to take 1000% longer than a $150 5TB Hard Drive AND you're going to have to sit there and remove / add a new disk every few minutes. And for what? The hard drive is cheaper after all of that.
      - monocasa 6y ago
        Hard drives have a bad habit of not turning on after being off for a year or two is why. And yeah, you'd be buying 16x 128GB media in this use case. Not the bottom of the barrel stuff for giving home movies to grandma.
        dragontamer 6y ago
        > Hard drives have a bad habit of not turning on after being off for a year or two is why. So push the "ZFS Scrub" button every 6 months. Don't store hard drives. Store a NAS. The entire freaking computer is stored as a unit. Every few months, turn it on, push "ZFS Scrub" to double-check the data, and you're set. BluRays also degenerate over time unless stored in proper UV-sealed conditions / temperature controlled conditions. Everything requires a degree of maintenance and checking. The question is how to best automate that checking process. Hard drives are read/written to at 200+ MB/s, making these maintenance checks much faster. They're also bigger, which means no need to manually insert / remove disks from drives. This entire process could be automated from a "Wake on LAN" packet and a few clicks from any terminal (phone, computer, whatever). ------- I dunno. I'm looking up these BD-R XL drives you're talking about: its like $30 per 100GB disk or something. That's an obscene price for so little storage. I guess if all your data fits in one of those disks its fine, but... I got some archived movies and stuff on my NAS (50GB per Blu Ray). Needed to store some of my video editing files (so I need the original data that matches with my video editing files). The real data of importance of mine probably fits in a BluRay. But then I won't have all the other stuff I've saved up "because I can" on my 2x 5TB NAS (Mirrored, so only 5TB of storage).

That's precisely what you need if you want to upload some backups from NAS systems or similar.

by est31 6y ago

That's precisely what you need if you want to upload some backups from NAS systems or similar.

$100 each starts making way less sense when they have the same semantics as a burned optical discs for home users. These days the main benefit to tape is the physical safety of having the media be inside a cartridge, and the streaming read speeds are stupid fast so you can reconstruct a backup faster. Home use, even with a data hoarder sized NAS, is better served with a bluray burner with multiple copies.

est31 6y ago
Storing even 5 TB of data onto bluray disks requires 100 disks of 50 GB dual layer capacity. That's a lot of disks.
- webmobdev 6y ago
  Yeah. And that too if you are willing to ignore the really slow speed to write them all!
  - Karunamon 6y ago
    If you're doing archival storage, does the write speed really matter? If you have enough volume of incoming data where the write speed does matter, you've already eliminated most archival storage methods anyways.
    - webmobdev 6y ago
      True. But slow transfer speed is still a negative when we are comparing it to other archival methods (in this case, the tape drives). And that is why the demand for tape drives for consumers.
      - Karunamon 6y ago
        I'm having a very difficult time understanding why they are a negative at all for most use cases. It's not like running a backup monopolizes the machine you're running it on. Again, tapes are for archival storage. Not nearline, not live, archival. As in, you write the data and likely don't come back to it for months to years.
- dsego 6y ago
  There might be a benefit to it. If 1 disc corrupts you only loose 50GB. If your hard drive fails, you loose all 5TB at once.
dragontamer 6y ago
> $100 each starts making way less sense when they have the same semantics as a burned optical discs for home users. These tape-drives have 300MB/s+ of read/write speed. Sequential yes, but almost all backup tasks are sequential. Optical has 10MB/s or so. You get more out of a 100Mbps connection to (insert cloud storage provider here), let alone Gbps. At a minimum, a modern, reasonable mechanism for backups needs to be faster than cloud (100Mbps or Gbps), otherwise its basically worthless to the consumer. Hard drives and Tape get there, but there was no real way to improve Optical's read/write performance (outside of overengineered "jukebox" robots available to Facebook and a few other select groups), so it went fully obsolete.
- monocasa 6y ago
  16x bluray is 72MB/s (576Mb/s).
  - dragontamer 6y ago
    Hard Drives are going 220MB/s and people still think they're too slow. I just gave a look at the first Blu Ray media on Newegg.com. Here's what is search #1: https://www.newegg.com/verbatim-6x-25gb-bd-r/p/N82E16817130156 https://www.newegg.com/verbatim-6x-25gb-bd-r/p/N82E168171301... That's 6x speed, or roughly 25MB/s. You can store 25GBs per disk and it is going to take 1000% longer than a $150 5TB Hard Drive AND you're going to have to sit there and remove / add a new disk every few minutes. And for what? The hard drive is cheaper after all of that.
    - monocasa 6y ago
      Hard drives have a bad habit of not turning on after being off for a year or two is why. And yeah, you'd be buying 16x 128GB media in this use case. Not the bottom of the barrel stuff for giving home movies to grandma.
      - dragontamer 6y ago
        > Hard drives have a bad habit of not turning on after being off for a year or two is why. So push the "ZFS Scrub" button every 6 months. Don't store hard drives. Store a NAS. The entire freaking computer is stored as a unit. Every few months, turn it on, push "ZFS Scrub" to double-check the data, and you're set. BluRays also degenerate over time unless stored in proper UV-sealed conditions / temperature controlled conditions. Everything requires a degree of maintenance and checking. The question is how to best automate that checking process. Hard drives are read/written to at 200+ MB/s, making these maintenance checks much faster. They're also bigger, which means no need to manually insert / remove disks from drives. This entire process could be automated from a "Wake on LAN" packet and a few clicks from any terminal (phone, computer, whatever). ------- I dunno. I'm looking up these BD-R XL drives you're talking about: its like $30 per 100GB disk or something. That's an obscene price for so little storage. I guess if all your data fits in one of those disks its fine, but... I got some archived movies and stuff on my NAS (50GB per Blu Ray). Needed to store some of my video editing files (so I need the original data that matches with my video editing files). The real data of importance of mine probably fits in a BluRay. But then I won't have all the other stuff I've saved up "because I can" on my 2x 5TB NAS (Mirrored, so only 5TB of storage).