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Where's their monopoly I see tons of different drive and tape manufacturers. Are they all paying some royalty to IBM for tech?
by rtkwe 2y ago
Where's their monopoly I see tons of different drive and tape manufacturers. Are they all paying some royalty to IBM for tech?
- markhahn 2y agothere are a couple tape makers, regardless of how many companies rebadge the product. afaik, there are only 2-3 drive makers too. but don't forget that tape doesn't make much sense (in its market) without the robotic library. there might be some off-brands that sell small libraries, but the big ones are, afaik, dominated by IBM.
- rtkwe 2y agoI'm just talking about single drive units you manually swap tapes on. That would still make an excellent long term cold backup for me even if I did have to swap the tape s once a week but they're still 4k+ unless I go all the way down to LTO-5 tapes that are just ~1.5TB which could be good enough for critical things but not really helpful for backing up everything.
- codemac 2y agoYes, they all pay royalties, and all the drives pay licensing for read heads.