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Is tape really that expensive nowadays? You can find LTO-7 tape drives on ebay for under 1k USD and actual LTO-7 tapes new from the manufacturer for less than 5
by CuriousCosmic 3y ago
Is tape really that expensive nowadays? You can find LTO-7 tape drives on ebay for under 1k USD and actual LTO-7 tapes new from the manufacturer for less than 50usd a piece.
If you are storing enough data that you are even considering tape, the cost of your tapes is going to be just as much as a second hand drive fairly quickly and the break even point against HDDs is like 5-6 HDDs or tapes.
- Filligree 3y agoI'm storing ~13 TB. Just enough that online backup (Backblaze etc.) is too expensive to be reasonable, not enough that tape is really sensible. ZFS fits the bill, and let me build a reliable off-site backup system to HDDs. LTO-7 has 6TB of capacity per tape, so I suppose I could get away with... well, ten or so? But it'd be a lot more manual work, and the tape drives are far more expensive than four 8TB HDDs. With tape, there's also the issue that if you only have one tape drive, you don't know if your tapes are readable in anything else.
- CuriousCosmic 3y agoYeah LTO-7 is 6TB uncompressed. A single 16TB Helium sealed HDD is 350USD (https://www.westerndigital.com/products/internal-drives/wd-gold-sata-hdd#WD161KRYZ https://www.westerndigital.com/products/internal-drives/wd-g...). When you mentioned tape, I was assuming you had a lot more data than just 13TB. Normally I hear people mention it with like 100+TB.