3 ms·

Yes. Tapes have a property (Linear Access, Slow random access) that make them useful only for backups/archiving. Business only need to buy very few for their

Yes. Tapes have a property (Linear Access, Slow random access) that make them useful only for backups/archiving. Business only need to buy very few for their server rooms (if that, many business are backing up to the cloud now) - so, super low volume of drives means that the cost of the R&D and manufacturing plant needs to be made up in increased costs per unit. An LTO-6 drive goes for about $2700, and can store 2.5TB/Tape - The tapes themselves are around $90 each. Most consumers would just go buy a 2 TB drive for two at a couple hundred dollars each. They have zero need or requirement for tapes.

hga 13y ago
On the other hand, it doesn't make sense for "consumers" to chase the latest and greatest tape technology, for which there's always a price premium. Plus there's no single disk drive that's fast enough to feed a LTO-5 drive, which I'm sure extends to LTO-6. (Note, each generation of LTO drives will write one generation back and read two generations back.) The latter wasn't available when I set my current home system (the limits of local disk back where firmly confirmed by this: http://www.ancell-ent.com/1715_Rex_Ave_127B_Joplin/images/ http://www.ancell-ent.com/1715_Rex_Ave_127B_Joplin/images/), but LTO-4, which will hold 800 GB per tape before compression and which while perhaps obsolescent is still widely used (hits some nice price performance points), was and I think still is quite feasible, albeit costly. But then again, how much is your data and piece of mind worth to you? HP 1760 drive is on the the slow end, but that's fine for consumers with much less severe time to backup and time to restore requirements. Newegg price is a bit above $2K, with some serious bargain shopping you should be able to get one for substantially less. Add at least one SAS adapter (I use two), I like the LSI 9211 line, and a -4i (4 internal ports, BTW, they work with SATA drives as well), current Newegg price $163, and a fast but small SAS drive for buffering, say a Seagate Cheetah or Savvio 15K drive of 146 or 300 GB size, Newegg has an anomalously priced Cheetah 300 GB at $168 right now, call it $200 plus or minus, and then of course media. There you want to get serious about bargain hunting and bulk buying (5-20 tapes at a time), but Newegg's single quantity pricing for Fujifilm or HP tapes is $40 plus or minus 2, and fairly easy bargain shopping I just did on Amazon to buy a few tape found HP tapes at $24-25 each from high reputation merchants. dragontamer at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7699179 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7699179 says LTO-5 tape is going for $25 each, which would match my experience with LTO-3 tapes costing about the same as LTO-4 when got my drive; I just use 9 tapes for Bacula incrementals and differentials for a while, then move them to the full pool.
- dragontamer 13y ago
  If you're gonna modernize that setup, I'll have to say that a cheap SSD for buffering will negate any future issues. Cheap PCIe SSDs are almost here (the cheap PCIe Sandforce controller chip was just released... consumer-ready PCIe SSDs ought to be around in just a couple of years). Its possible to max out the 6GBps channel (ie: 480MB/s) with say... a $90 120GB Vertex-3. (http://www.amazon.com/OCZ-Vertex-2-5-Inch-Performance-VTX3-25SAT3-120G/dp/B004Q81CKY http://www.amazon.com/OCZ-Vertex-2-5-Inch-Performance-VTX3-2...). The M.2 SSDs and PCIe SSDs are faster of course, which is why Consumer PCIe SSDs are getting pushed out by LSI and others. There isn't much point to faster SSDs when you're limited by the 6Gbps SATA port. For example: $300 for the 240GB Plextor M6e, with read speeds measured at ~667 MB/s: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820249043 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820249... So SSDs are actually both cheaper, and more performant than a 15k SAS buffering drive!
  - hga 13y ago
    Modern NAND based SSDs wear out, their individual cells can be rewritten only so many time. So a big drive even with a smallish buffer is a consumable, although maybe the numbers work out now. They didn't ~3 years ago when I set up my current system.
    - dragontamer 13y ago
      http://techreport.com/review/26058/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-data-retention-after-600tb http://techreport.com/review/26058/the-ssd-endurance-experim... The TLC SSD (3-bits per cell) is showing minor issues after 600TB of writing, but is still a usable drive. The MLC (2-bits per cell) SSDs have shown no issues after 600TB. In comparison, a tape-drive would have long-past its ~200 end-to-end reads rating. MLC SSDs wear out slower than a tape drive! (Please don't take this sentence too seriously. I know I'm using hyperbole) The SSDs I've linked to are MLC (2-bits per cell) designs, and can be expected to have roughly the same endurance as the MLC SSDs that techreport is testing. By far the most telling takeaway thus far is the fact that all the drives have endured 600TB of writes without dying. That's an awful lot of data—well over 300GB per day for five years—and far more than typical PC users are ever likely to write to their drives. Besides, the backing storage is Tape. You're only using the SSD as a temporary stop so that your writes can be buffered out all at once. Using an SSD as a caching option has been extensively tested! Its safe to use for this sort of thing.

hga 13y ago

On the other hand, it doesn't make sense for "consumers" to chase the latest and greatest tape technology, for which there's always a price premium. Plus there's no single disk drive that's fast enough to feed a LTO-5 drive, which I'm sure extends to LTO-6. (Note, each generation of LTO drives will write one generation back and read two generations back.) The latter wasn't available when I set my current home system (the limits of local disk back where firmly confirmed by this: http://www.ancell-ent.com/1715_Rex_Ave_127B_Joplin/images/ http://www.ancell-ent.com/1715_Rex_Ave_127B_Joplin/images/), but LTO-4, which will hold 800 GB per tape before compression and which while perhaps obsolescent is still widely used (hits some nice price performance points), was and I think still is quite feasible, albeit costly. But then again, how much is your data and piece of mind worth to you? HP 1760 drive is on the the slow end, but that's fine for consumers with much less severe time to backup and time to restore requirements. Newegg price is a bit above $2K, with some serious bargain shopping you should be able to get one for substantially less. Add at least one SAS adapter (I use two), I like the LSI 9211 line, and a -4i (4 internal ports, BTW, they work with SATA drives as well), current Newegg price $163, and a fast but small SAS drive for buffering, say a Seagate Cheetah or Savvio 15K drive of 146 or 300 GB size, Newegg has an anomalously priced Cheetah 300 GB at $168 right now, call it $200 plus or minus, and then of course media. There you want to get serious about bargain hunting and bulk buying (5-20 tapes at a time), but Newegg's single quantity pricing for Fujifilm or HP tapes is $40 plus or minus 2, and fairly easy bargain shopping I just did on Amazon to buy a few tape found HP tapes at $24-25 each from high reputation merchants. dragontamer at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7699179 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7699179 says LTO-5 tape is going for $25 each, which would match my experience with LTO-3 tapes costing about the same as LTO-4 when got my drive; I just use 9 tapes for Bacula incrementals and differentials for a while, then move them to the full pool.

dragontamer 13y ago
If you're gonna modernize that setup, I'll have to say that a cheap SSD for buffering will negate any future issues. Cheap PCIe SSDs are almost here (the cheap PCIe Sandforce controller chip was just released... consumer-ready PCIe SSDs ought to be around in just a couple of years). Its possible to max out the 6GBps channel (ie: 480MB/s) with say... a $90 120GB Vertex-3. (http://www.amazon.com/OCZ-Vertex-2-5-Inch-Performance-VTX3-25SAT3-120G/dp/B004Q81CKY http://www.amazon.com/OCZ-Vertex-2-5-Inch-Performance-VTX3-2...). The M.2 SSDs and PCIe SSDs are faster of course, which is why Consumer PCIe SSDs are getting pushed out by LSI and others. There isn't much point to faster SSDs when you're limited by the 6Gbps SATA port. For example: $300 for the 240GB Plextor M6e, with read speeds measured at ~667 MB/s: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820249043 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820249... So SSDs are actually both cheaper, and more performant than a 15k SAS buffering drive!
- hga 13y ago
  Modern NAND based SSDs wear out, their individual cells can be rewritten only so many time. So a big drive even with a smallish buffer is a consumable, although maybe the numbers work out now. They didn't ~3 years ago when I set up my current system.
  - dragontamer 13y ago
    http://techreport.com/review/26058/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-data-retention-after-600tb http://techreport.com/review/26058/the-ssd-endurance-experim... The TLC SSD (3-bits per cell) is showing minor issues after 600TB of writing, but is still a usable drive. The MLC (2-bits per cell) SSDs have shown no issues after 600TB. In comparison, a tape-drive would have long-past its ~200 end-to-end reads rating. MLC SSDs wear out slower than a tape drive! (Please don't take this sentence too seriously. I know I'm using hyperbole) The SSDs I've linked to are MLC (2-bits per cell) designs, and can be expected to have roughly the same endurance as the MLC SSDs that techreport is testing. By far the most telling takeaway thus far is the fact that all the drives have endured 600TB of writes without dying. That's an awful lot of data—well over 300GB per day for five years—and far more than typical PC users are ever likely to write to their drives. Besides, the backing storage is Tape. You're only using the SSD as a temporary stop so that your writes can be buffered out all at once. Using an SSD as a caching option has been extensively tested! Its safe to use for this sort of thing.