News MagStor unveils tape drive with Thunderbolt 5 interface for Macs

[Admin]

MagStor launches industry's first LTO tape drive with a Thunderbolt 5 interface, targeting high-end users who need massive, long-term data storage and future-proof connectivity.

MagStor unveils tape drive with Thunderbolt 5 interface for Macs : Read more

 

[jp7189]

Thats a tough product to market. If the use case is video, then LTO compression has no gain - meaning you only get 18TB per tape. For a desktop solution, I'd rather choose a HDD.

At $6k per drive before you can even spend $100 per tape it doesn't start to make sense until you're talking about 100's of TB that need to rotate offsite on a regular basis, and then you're talking about a robotic changer which is significantly less expensive than the drives themselves.

 

[Misgar]

How many home users will be able to feed uninterrupted data to an LTO9 drive at 400MB/s native transfer rate, let alone 1000MB/s compressed transfer rate? You'll need a pretty deep wallet to afford LTO9. Fine for many business users.
https://www.lto-tape.co.uk/lto-9-tape-specifications/

My ancient LTO4 SAS drives run at only 80MB/s native transfer which is fine for multiple 50MB RAW files and JPG files down to around 12MB, but when you start copying folders full of smaller files below 8MB, the drive starts to "shoe shine".

I've tried buffering Gigabytes of small files on M.2 NVMe Gen.4 drives, but it makes no difference. Instead, I compress all small files into several huge RAR files and the problem disappears.
https://community.spiceworks.com/t/...ausing-shoe-shining-should-i-zip-first/565423

If you're throwing large 4K video files at this LTO9 drive from a Mac, you shouldn't have any trouble, but it's something to be aware when backing up thousands of small files. Corporate IT Admins will already have this covered.