3 ms·

LTO does seem to be the last bastion of closed source vendor lock-in. That being said, even if prices dropped by 75%, I'm not sure our shop would look to do LT

LTO does seem to be the last bastion of closed source vendor lock-in. That being said, even if prices dropped by 75%, I'm not sure our shop would look to do LTO instead of a series of hard drives. 20 TB hard drives are now $400.

EvanAnderson 4y ago
If you fall in the right place on the curve $75 / LTO-8 cartridge still makes a lot of sense. It doesn’t take many $400 hard drives to make up the price for a tape element at that per-cartridge price. (Assuming you can deal with sequential access, etc.)
waynesonfire 4y ago
Hdds are soo fragile. They constantly break. A proper 3-2-1 backup solution is incomplete without tape IMHO.
- Hamuko 4y ago
  At least HDDs are fast, cheap, don't have massive up-front investments. You can take a couple of HDDs, RAID them together for reliability and you can still write and read data at humane speeds.
  - wazoox 4y ago
    A RAID array isn't a backup. Your data is still live on it, an "rm -rf" away from destruction. HDDs fare poorly when shelved for a long time, RAID are even worse in that regard. OTOH a tape on a shelf is perfectly safe for 5 to 10 years or more (I recently restored 1998/99 sensitive data from LTO2 tapes written in 2003).
    - Hamuko 4y ago
      >A RAID array isn't a backup. Who said it was? >Your data is still live on it, an "rm -rf" away from destruction. How is accidental deletion not a problem with tapes?
      - wazoox 4y ago
        Unless you store your tapes right next to your cache of neodymium magnets, that should be pretty easy. Writing to a tape is very deliberate generally. Much more than writing to disks.
  - matheusmoreira 4y ago
    With current software and hardware RAID solutions, we also have massive up-front cost. We can't buy drives as needed and add them to the system one at a time. I wish it was easier to incrementally expand capacity of RAID setups. ZFS promises RAID-Z expansion but it still hasn't been released. Btrfs has a flexible block allocator that supports incremental expansion as well as heterogeneous drive pools but unfortunately the parity support cannot be relied upon to this day.
  - OnlyMortal 4y ago
    RAID is not reliable. Source: Former HPE Storage dev.
wazoox 4y ago
Nothing prevents you from using open source software with LTO, which is a multi vendor format. You can read tapes written with an IBM drive with a Quantum drive... LTO 8 tapes are 80$ or so, formatted as LTO8M in a LTO9 drive they hold 15TB uncompressed. LTO7 are like 30$ and hold 9TB uncompressed in LTO7M format.

EvanAnderson 4y ago

If you fall in the right place on the curve $75 / LTO-8 cartridge still makes a lot of sense. It doesn’t take many $400 hard drives to make up the price for a tape element at that per-cartridge price. (Assuming you can deal with sequential access, etc.)

waynesonfire 4y ago

Hdds are soo fragile. They constantly break. A proper 3-2-1 backup solution is incomplete without tape IMHO.

Hamuko 4y ago
At least HDDs are fast, cheap, don't have massive up-front investments. You can take a couple of HDDs, RAID them together for reliability and you can still write and read data at humane speeds.
- wazoox 4y ago
  A RAID array isn't a backup. Your data is still live on it, an "rm -rf" away from destruction. HDDs fare poorly when shelved for a long time, RAID are even worse in that regard. OTOH a tape on a shelf is perfectly safe for 5 to 10 years or more (I recently restored 1998/99 sensitive data from LTO2 tapes written in 2003).
  - Hamuko 4y ago
    >A RAID array isn't a backup. Who said it was? >Your data is still live on it, an "rm -rf" away from destruction. How is accidental deletion not a problem with tapes?
    - wazoox 4y ago
      Unless you store your tapes right next to your cache of neodymium magnets, that should be pretty easy. Writing to a tape is very deliberate generally. Much more than writing to disks.
- matheusmoreira 4y ago
  With current software and hardware RAID solutions, we also have massive up-front cost. We can't buy drives as needed and add them to the system one at a time. I wish it was easier to incrementally expand capacity of RAID setups. ZFS promises RAID-Z expansion but it still hasn't been released. Btrfs has a flexible block allocator that supports incremental expansion as well as heterogeneous drive pools but unfortunately the parity support cannot be relied upon to this day.
- OnlyMortal 4y ago
  RAID is not reliable. Source: Former HPE Storage dev.

wazoox 4y ago

Nothing prevents you from using open source software with LTO, which is a multi vendor format. You can read tapes written with an IBM drive with a Quantum drive... LTO 8 tapes are 80$ or so, formatted as LTO8M in a LTO9 drive they hold 15TB uncompressed. LTO7 are like 30$ and hold 9TB uncompressed in LTO7M format.