6 ms·

At what scale does tape begin to make financial sense?

by jonatron 3y ago

dd82 3y ago
when you need long term stable storage without getting hit by bit rot
- aspyct 3y ago
  Pretty sure it's not immune to bit rot. Have any data to back your claim?
  - perbu 3y ago
    Tape drives will, when writing, re-read the data as it is written to make sure no errors are written and will transparently correct any errors. In addition, quite a bit of error correcting code is written, making it possible to correct simple errors. So perhaps not 100% immune, but partial immunity to bit-rot is a pretty important part of the LTO spec.
  - rout39574 3y ago
    Immune, no. Far less prone to bit rot? yeah. My source is running backups for a significant fraction of a large univiersity for ~20 years. We had a routine cadence of tape errors, which were much less frequent than our routine cadence of disk replacement. I suppose that's anecdote. :) But it's what I've got.
  - throw0101a 3y ago
    > Have any data to back your claim? Search for "year" in the specification of HPE's Ultrium LTO media: * https://www.hpe.com/psnow/doc/c04154430 https://www.hpe.com/psnow/doc/c04154430 Or IBM's white paper: * https://www.ibm.com/downloads/cas/Z3RYV0BR https://www.ibm.com/downloads/cas/Z3RYV0BR
    - guerby 3y ago
      So 30 years for HPE when stored in appropriate himidity/temperature range.
barelyauser 3y ago
If it didn't (for someone) then this product would not exist.
driverdan 3y ago
Quite large scale. Last time I priced tapes out they were more expensive per TB than hard drives.
perbu 3y ago
If you need the following: - Storing petabytes of data without requiring any power. Hard-drives are cheap but each one will require quite a bit of power - Having the data be offline, ie, not available to an attacker which somehow managed to take control over your network - Having the data be in a physical format which can be easily put in a safe or in the back of a car when there is a risk of flood or fire - Having data on a media that won't regrade over a period of say, 10-30 years. Hard-drives tend to fail
- izzydata 3y ago
  What stops you from writing data to a spinning disk HDD and then unplugging it and putting it in a safe?
  - comboy 3y ago
    Typical reliable offline HDD storage is 2-3 years. For tape it's 20-30 years.
  - jdhawk 3y ago
    Bitrot.
  - perbu 3y ago
    I've got a bunch of video on a harddrive that I put in storage 20 years ago. Tried to spin it up again and it just makes funny noises. So, yeah, spinning rust might rust.
    - seniorivn 3y ago
      its possible to restore it in a data restoration shop, if you are interested
  - fbnlsr 3y ago
    This is what I personally do. I have small needs when it comes to backups (< 1TB), so I have one backup that's just a regular HDD stored in a drawer, and another one that's on a Scaleway cold storage container.
dsr_ 3y ago
Think about tape as an archiving tool, rather than a backup-and-restore tool. (The three major tiers are A: I accidentally deleted a file or directory yesterday, so I need to get a copy from snapshots; B: the machine I was working on exploded, so I need to rebuild it and repopulate it with my data; C: archive for some need in the far future) Suppose you have large quantities of data that you need to preserve for legal reasons -- it's always legal reasons, unless you are in academia or similar -- but you will not be accessing much. That's when you use tapes. For most other purposes, you want a snapshotting filesystem or an offsite filesystem made from those snapshots.
- at_a_remove 3y ago
  I think there's a case to be made for a subset of C: archiving video originals, film scans, and the like. While the humans might work with intermediates ("mezzanine") files, the originals are just miserably huge, but you never want to lose them.
  - khobragade 3y ago
    Exactly as Gavin from The Slow Mo Guys describes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lO-SAzFaN18 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lO-SAzFaN18
comboy 3y ago
I use it at home for offline backup. You can get LTO-6 pretty cheap and big chunk of my backup is just things I want to keep indefinitely. You can put tapes in multiple locations easily and not worry for 20 years. If you just want to store lots of data in a single place I think MAID still beats the tape at any scale (especially if you want automated retrieval)
- copperx 3y ago
  Is there an LTO-6 tape drive that is, say, less than a thousand dollars? All tape drives I've seen are between 2-4k USD.
  - comboy 3y ago
    I bought an used one (HP Ultirum 6250), you should be able to get it under $1000, closer to $500, but I recommend getting it with the controller so that you know there are no issues. Note that these controllers are made to be mounted inside heavily ventilated rack case, so if you are putting it inside desktop PC I suggest making sure some fan blows on it. It's discouraging that it's so complicated which made me back out of the purchase a few times, but it was well worth it.
  - vGPU 3y ago
    Used, yes.
wongarsu 3y ago
Once you fill shelves with them. The tape itself is quite cheap (LTO-9 is 18TB for $100), but the drives are expensive ($5000+ for an LTO-9 drive), so you need quite a bit of volume to make it worth it. You can get an earlier breakeven point by buying used equipment for older generations. But no matter what you do, at small scale hard drives will be cheaper (and can be put on a shelf or in a safe too)
fidotron 3y ago
Depends on how much data you generate. Even small game studios will use them for regular physical offsite backups for potential disaster recovery. (In extreme cases we stored regular snapshots of dev machines as vmware images). Essential when data is created faster than the locally available internet bandwidth which in media industries is quite often.
aaron695 3y ago
[dead]
adrian_b 3y ago
I am using tape for archiving my data and the break-even point with hard disks, the last time when I have checked, perhaps one year ago, was somewhere between 200 TB and 300 TB of stored data, after buying a tape drive for about $3000. For larger amounts of data, the money savings vs. HDDs increase quickly. The break-even point vs. HDDs is lower for long-term archiving than for short-term backups, because the lifetime of tapes is much longer (it is limited not by the degradation of the tapes but only by the risk that compatible tape drives might become hard to obtain), so you need multiple HDDs to store data for the lifetime of a single tape.
lizknope 3y ago
Above 300TB it starts to make sense to buy an LTO-9 drive ($4,500) and tapes ($120 each for 18TB) Right now you can get 18TB drives for $290 so you can get 306TB for $4,930
pjdesno 3y ago
We've got a 9-drive system with a table robot between two aisles of tapes, the whole thing is maybe 8" by 20". It definitely makes sense at that scale.

At what scale does tape begin to make financial sense?

dd82 3y ago

when you need long term stable storage without getting hit by bit rot

aspyct 3y ago
Pretty sure it's not immune to bit rot. Have any data to back your claim?
- perbu 3y ago
  Tape drives will, when writing, re-read the data as it is written to make sure no errors are written and will transparently correct any errors. In addition, quite a bit of error correcting code is written, making it possible to correct simple errors. So perhaps not 100% immune, but partial immunity to bit-rot is a pretty important part of the LTO spec.
- rout39574 3y ago
  Immune, no. Far less prone to bit rot? yeah. My source is running backups for a significant fraction of a large univiersity for ~20 years. We had a routine cadence of tape errors, which were much less frequent than our routine cadence of disk replacement. I suppose that's anecdote. :) But it's what I've got.
- throw0101a 3y ago
  > Have any data to back your claim? Search for "year" in the specification of HPE's Ultrium LTO media: * https://www.hpe.com/psnow/doc/c04154430 https://www.hpe.com/psnow/doc/c04154430 Or IBM's white paper: * https://www.ibm.com/downloads/cas/Z3RYV0BR https://www.ibm.com/downloads/cas/Z3RYV0BR
  - guerby 3y ago
    So 30 years for HPE when stored in appropriate himidity/temperature range.

barelyauser 3y ago

If it didn't (for someone) then this product would not exist.

driverdan 3y ago

Quite large scale. Last time I priced tapes out they were more expensive per TB than hard drives.

perbu 3y ago

If you need the following: - Storing petabytes of data without requiring any power. Hard-drives are cheap but each one will require quite a bit of power - Having the data be offline, ie, not available to an attacker which somehow managed to take control over your network - Having the data be in a physical format which can be easily put in a safe or in the back of a car when there is a risk of flood or fire - Having data on a media that won't regrade over a period of say, 10-30 years. Hard-drives tend to fail

izzydata 3y ago
What stops you from writing data to a spinning disk HDD and then unplugging it and putting it in a safe?
- comboy 3y ago
  Typical reliable offline HDD storage is 2-3 years. For tape it's 20-30 years.
- jdhawk 3y ago
  Bitrot.
- perbu 3y ago
  I've got a bunch of video on a harddrive that I put in storage 20 years ago. Tried to spin it up again and it just makes funny noises. So, yeah, spinning rust might rust.
  - seniorivn 3y ago
    its possible to restore it in a data restoration shop, if you are interested
- fbnlsr 3y ago
  This is what I personally do. I have small needs when it comes to backups (< 1TB), so I have one backup that's just a regular HDD stored in a drawer, and another one that's on a Scaleway cold storage container.

dsr_ 3y ago

Think about tape as an archiving tool, rather than a backup-and-restore tool. (The three major tiers are A: I accidentally deleted a file or directory yesterday, so I need to get a copy from snapshots; B: the machine I was working on exploded, so I need to rebuild it and repopulate it with my data; C: archive for some need in the far future) Suppose you have large quantities of data that you need to preserve for legal reasons -- it's always legal reasons, unless you are in academia or similar -- but you will not be accessing much. That's when you use tapes. For most other purposes, you want a snapshotting filesystem or an offsite filesystem made from those snapshots.

at_a_remove 3y ago
I think there's a case to be made for a subset of C: archiving video originals, film scans, and the like. While the humans might work with intermediates ("mezzanine") files, the originals are just miserably huge, but you never want to lose them.
- khobragade 3y ago
  Exactly as Gavin from The Slow Mo Guys describes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lO-SAzFaN18 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lO-SAzFaN18

comboy 3y ago

I use it at home for offline backup. You can get LTO-6 pretty cheap and big chunk of my backup is just things I want to keep indefinitely. You can put tapes in multiple locations easily and not worry for 20 years. If you just want to store lots of data in a single place I think MAID still beats the tape at any scale (especially if you want automated retrieval)

copperx 3y ago
Is there an LTO-6 tape drive that is, say, less than a thousand dollars? All tape drives I've seen are between 2-4k USD.
- comboy 3y ago
  I bought an used one (HP Ultirum 6250), you should be able to get it under $1000, closer to $500, but I recommend getting it with the controller so that you know there are no issues. Note that these controllers are made to be mounted inside heavily ventilated rack case, so if you are putting it inside desktop PC I suggest making sure some fan blows on it. It's discouraging that it's so complicated which made me back out of the purchase a few times, but it was well worth it.
- vGPU 3y ago
  Used, yes.

wongarsu 3y ago

Once you fill shelves with them. The tape itself is quite cheap (LTO-9 is 18TB for $100), but the drives are expensive ($5000+ for an LTO-9 drive), so you need quite a bit of volume to make it worth it. You can get an earlier breakeven point by buying used equipment for older generations. But no matter what you do, at small scale hard drives will be cheaper (and can be put on a shelf or in a safe too)

fidotron 3y ago

Depends on how much data you generate. Even small game studios will use them for regular physical offsite backups for potential disaster recovery. (In extreme cases we stored regular snapshots of dev machines as vmware images). Essential when data is created faster than the locally available internet bandwidth which in media industries is quite often.

aaron695 3y ago

[dead]

adrian_b 3y ago

I am using tape for archiving my data and the break-even point with hard disks, the last time when I have checked, perhaps one year ago, was somewhere between 200 TB and 300 TB of stored data, after buying a tape drive for about $3000. For larger amounts of data, the money savings vs. HDDs increase quickly. The break-even point vs. HDDs is lower for long-term archiving than for short-term backups, because the lifetime of tapes is much longer (it is limited not by the degradation of the tapes but only by the risk that compatible tape drives might become hard to obtain), so you need multiple HDDs to store data for the lifetime of a single tape.

lizknope 3y ago

Above 300TB it starts to make sense to buy an LTO-9 drive ($4,500) and tapes ($120 each for 18TB) Right now you can get 18TB drives for $290 so you can get 306TB for $4,930

pjdesno 3y ago

We've got a 9-drive system with a table robot between two aisles of tapes, the whole thing is maybe 8" by 20". It definitely makes sense at that scale.