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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. Those tapes only hold

by 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).
- blackrock 6y ago
  True, on hard drives, the controller board will eventually fail. The solders might decompose or the circuitry might fail. Then you’re left with a platter full of randomized bits. But on tape, the controller mechanism is separated from the storage medium. The controller mechanism is inside the drive readers itself, which will eventually fail. So for both, it’s a trade off. They’re both going to eventually fail.
- ardy42 6y ago
  > 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. But it looks like the cheapest drive on Newegg for that is $3,299.00: https://www.newegg.com/p/2BM-0046-00001 https://www.newegg.com/p/2BM-0046-00001 > 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. No dispute there, but I think most >120 TB home use cases run into the question of if it's even worth it to keep the data (raw/uncompressed). For most people, the answer is probably no, and curation/compression makes far more sense. For instance, I don't think it's even typical for wedding photographers/videographers to store their final product indefinitely, let alone the raw footage for a re-edit. You can keep a lot more events in a lot less space if you're only keep the raw footage for a few recent events and the 15-30 minute final edit for a year after it's finalized. > 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. Not if you swap disks as offline storage. > 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). Honestly, the theoretical longevity is the only aspect of tape that appeals to me, but like you said enterprise tapes will end up being like these enterprise optical disks in a fairly short period of time, so you're regularly going to have migration legwork to do or your data's effectively toast. https://twitter.com/foone/status/1236524992709316608 https://twitter.com/foone/status/1236524992709316608

by ardy42 6y ago

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).

blackrock 6y ago
True, on hard drives, the controller board will eventually fail. The solders might decompose or the circuitry might fail. Then you’re left with a platter full of randomized bits. But on tape, the controller mechanism is separated from the storage medium. The controller mechanism is inside the drive readers itself, which will eventually fail. So for both, it’s a trade off. They’re both going to eventually fail.
ardy42 6y ago
> 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. But it looks like the cheapest drive on Newegg for that is $3,299.00: https://www.newegg.com/p/2BM-0046-00001 https://www.newegg.com/p/2BM-0046-00001 > 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. No dispute there, but I think most >120 TB home use cases run into the question of if it's even worth it to keep the data (raw/uncompressed). For most people, the answer is probably no, and curation/compression makes far more sense. For instance, I don't think it's even typical for wedding photographers/videographers to store their final product indefinitely, let alone the raw footage for a re-edit. You can keep a lot more events in a lot less space if you're only keep the raw footage for a few recent events and the 15-30 minute final edit for a year after it's finalized. > 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. Not if you swap disks as offline storage. > 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). Honestly, the theoretical longevity is the only aspect of tape that appeals to me, but like you said enterprise tapes will end up being like these enterprise optical disks in a fairly short period of time, so you're regularly going to have migration legwork to do or your data's effectively toast. https://twitter.com/foone/status/1236524992709316608 https://twitter.com/foone/status/1236524992709316608