3 ms·
What scale are you working at and how have you made it cost-effective versus a stack of external HDDs?
by jl6 5y ago
What scale are you working at and how have you made it cost-effective versus a stack of external HDDs?
- adrian_b 5y agoI am not that poster, but I also use tapes. One may save about $14 per TB by using tapes instead of external HDDs (which strangely have become cheaper than internal HDDs). In order to recover the cost of the tape drive, you need to write about 200 TB. I have about 50 LTO-7 tapes, i.e. about 300 TB of compressed archives, so I have recovered much more than I have paid on a LTO-7 tape drive, 5 years ago. Nevertheless, even if would have written only 100 TB, I would still have bought the tape drive, just for the peace of mind, because after the optical discs became too small I have used HDDs for archival storage, but after a few years in cold storage they become unreliable. If I had not stored duplicates for each HDD, I would have lost a lot of data. Of course, someone who needs to archive just 20 TB or even 40 TB of raw data, can buy just 2 or 4 HDDs and store each file on 2 HDDs and that should be OK. For 100 TB or more of raw data (i.e. 200 TB, when counting the redundancy, because also for tapes you should store at least 2 copies, preferably not in the same location), tapes become cheaper.
- zitterbewegung 5y agoMy brother got a cheap LTO tape drive on eBay and he bought a few LTO tapes so I think I bought one off of him for a few dollars more. It’s only a few hundred gigabytes and the tape holds about one terabytes . Note this is my long term cold storage I have backups made on my MacBook Air (hard disk) and my sold MacBook Pro (ssd which I will use on my new 2021 MacBook Pro eventually). I also have backups using blu ray discs and I have one long term storage blu ray that I have been meaning to use