3 ms·
Wow, this reminded me that tape drives exist. The best value HD on that list, among ones I'd want to buy for NAS use, is a Seagate 28TB for $480. An LTO-9 tape
by kstrauser 1y ago
Wow, this reminded me that tape drives exist.
The best value HD on that list, among ones I'd want to buy for NAS use, is a Seagate 28TB for $480. An LTO-9 tape is 45TB for $90. I found a USB-C (because why not) LTO-9 drive for $6,499.
The crossover price is at 448TB, where the total cost of 16 HD drives is $7,680, but tape drive + 10 tapes is "only" $7,399.
Huh. That's a lot lower than I would've expected. That's a very manageable price for the kind of business that wants someone to take a backup offsite nightly, and is probably a whole awful lot more robust for that kind of regular transportation.
- wmf 1y agoThose tapes are actually 18 TB so you need more to break even. Also 24 TB drives have been on sale for ~$250 occasionally.
- bestouff 1y agoTrue that, but also those 28TB disks are actually 25TB. So the break even point moves back.
- jasode 1y agoIf you're trying to compare equivalent units-of-measure of terabyte (10^12) vs tebibyte (2^40), it's: 28TB (HDD) vs 18TB (LTO-9) ... or ... 25TiB (HDD) vs 16.37TiB (LTO-9) The 25Tib shouldn't be compared with gp's clarification of 18TB raw uncompressed capacity. https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/ts4500-tape-library?topic=cartridges-capacity-supported-lto-tape https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/ts4500-tape-library?topic=cartri...
- creshal 1y agoYeah, tape is alive and kicking for business use. Automated tape libraries add a few grand to the total, but you get the added benefit of not having to change tapes daily. My only concern is that tape speeds are stagnating around a terabyte per hour, while you can somewhat parallelize jobs with multi-drive libraries, it increases cost and complexity significantly.