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> 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. Noticea

by 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

Karunamon 6y ago
You don't even need the absolute latest drives to get reasonable storage volumes. Some careful shopping can net you an LTO-5 (1.5TB native capacity) library unit (one that can be upgraded to newer generations) for under $500, with new tapes $10-15 each. The nice thing about LTO as a format is its relative predictability and ease of acquiring the parts, even the very obsolete ones. It's all SCSI or SAS, most of the interesting stuff happens at the hardware level, with a bog-standard API. Your average backup app, whether it be Backup Exec or mtx/tar/etc. on Linux doesn't need to care about the media format. Unlike actual "enterprise" shops with datacenters and support contracts and such cruft, where the primary concern is "does it work", it is fine to buy older units second-hand. They are plentiful and cheap.
- gruez 6y ago
  > You don't even need the absolute latest drives to get reasonable storage volumes. Some careful shopping can net you an LTO-5 (1.5TB native capacity) library unit (one that can be upgraded to newer generations) for under $500, with new tapes $10-15 each. That's still... pretty terrible. If we compare you costs for a tape drive against a 14TB easystore @ $190[1], the break-even point is around 72TB. I don't know about you, but that's of data you have to store for it to be worth it. Even at 150TB you're only looking at around ~25% (~$500) in savings compared to hard drive, which I don't think is much when you factor in how much of a hassle tape drives are to work with. [1] https://slickdeals.net/f/14587381-14tb-wd-easystore-external-usb-3-0-hard-drive-190-free-s-h https://slickdeals.net/f/14587381-14tb-wd-easystore-external... [2] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=solve+y+%3D+500+%2B+%28x%2F1.5%29*10%2C+y+%3D+x%2F14*190 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=solve+y+%3D+500+%2B+%2...
  - Karunamon 6y ago
    It's not a fair comparison to put up hard drives (integrated mechanics) against tape drives (seprated mechanics). They do not solve the same problem and have different longevity profiles. If I'm spending $500 on tape storage, it's because I want something that will last a long time, something that portable hard drives tend to have issues with. LTO5 onward supports LTFS, which exposes the tape to the OS as if it were any other removable storage, with the one proviso that deleting files doesn't reclaim space unless the entire tape is wiped.
    - seg_lol 6y ago
      LTFS is ok, a multilevel tar file with a file list followed by an FEC encoded block store would be easier and more portable. It has been 8+ years since I played with LTFS, so maybe it has improved.
      - Karunamon 6y ago
        LTFS as of today is supported in FUSE, which realistically means it works on every OS that matters.

by ardy42 6y ago

Karunamon 6y ago

You don't even need the absolute latest drives to get reasonable storage volumes. Some careful shopping can net you an LTO-5 (1.5TB native capacity) library unit (one that can be upgraded to newer generations) for under $500, with new tapes $10-15 each. The nice thing about LTO as a format is its relative predictability and ease of acquiring the parts, even the very obsolete ones. It's all SCSI or SAS, most of the interesting stuff happens at the hardware level, with a bog-standard API. Your average backup app, whether it be Backup Exec or mtx/tar/etc. on Linux doesn't need to care about the media format. Unlike actual "enterprise" shops with datacenters and support contracts and such cruft, where the primary concern is "does it work", it is fine to buy older units second-hand. They are plentiful and cheap.

gruez 6y ago
> You don't even need the absolute latest drives to get reasonable storage volumes. Some careful shopping can net you an LTO-5 (1.5TB native capacity) library unit (one that can be upgraded to newer generations) for under $500, with new tapes $10-15 each. That's still... pretty terrible. If we compare you costs for a tape drive against a 14TB easystore @ $190[1], the break-even point is around 72TB. I don't know about you, but that's of data you have to store for it to be worth it. Even at 150TB you're only looking at around ~25% (~$500) in savings compared to hard drive, which I don't think is much when you factor in how much of a hassle tape drives are to work with. [1] https://slickdeals.net/f/14587381-14tb-wd-easystore-external-usb-3-0-hard-drive-190-free-s-h https://slickdeals.net/f/14587381-14tb-wd-easystore-external... [2] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=solve+y+%3D+500+%2B+%28x%2F1.5%29*10%2C+y+%3D+x%2F14*190 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=solve+y+%3D+500+%2B+%2...
- Karunamon 6y ago
  It's not a fair comparison to put up hard drives (integrated mechanics) against tape drives (seprated mechanics). They do not solve the same problem and have different longevity profiles. If I'm spending $500 on tape storage, it's because I want something that will last a long time, something that portable hard drives tend to have issues with. LTO5 onward supports LTFS, which exposes the tape to the OS as if it were any other removable storage, with the one proviso that deleting files doesn't reclaim space unless the entire tape is wiped.
  - seg_lol 6y ago
    LTFS is ok, a multilevel tar file with a file list followed by an FEC encoded block store would be easier and more portable. It has been 8+ years since I played with LTFS, so maybe it has improved.
    - Karunamon 6y ago
      LTFS as of today is supported in FUSE, which realistically means it works on every OS that matters.