News Months after Elon Musk's DOGE crusade to wipe it out, LTO tape storage is bigger than ever — a record 176.5 exabytes shipped in 2024, the fourth co...

[Admin]

Tape storage shipments have enjoyed their fourth consecutive year of growth, increasing 15.4% according to the most recent data.

Months after Elon Musk's DOGE crusade to wipe it out, LTO tape storage is bigger than ever — a record 176.5 exabytes shipped in 2024, the fourth co... : Read more

 

[Exploding PSU]

It's super hard for me to wrap around how massive 576 terabytes worth of storage is..

Just the other day, I finished what I like to call MOAB (Mother of all backups) in preparation for a Backblaze upload.
A backup of every single media files (videos, pictures, music) and documents that my family has ever created and downloaded since the late-2000s.
Absolutely everything is included in it, from copies of old digicam videos, CD / DVD rips, various data from dozens of old phones we owned over the years, scans of physical photo albums, texts, even the random stuff like files I found on forgotten thumb drives. I had to bring various old devices to the repair shop just to extract the data from those old, broken things.

If one of us captured, wrote, or recorded it, then it's in that backup..
From something as important as pictures of me growing up to something as inconsequential as Untitled.txt file containing just the letter 'a' that I made for some reason.
From irreplaceable videos like a wedding vow to an accidental voice record of me butt dialing random contacts from a decade ago..
Every single thing is in there.

And that complete digital history of our lives "only" amounts to just shy of 6 TB ...

576 TB is.... impossible for me to grasp.

 

[Thecommi]

Your wife must not take pictures of every meal she eats!

 

[pug_s]

It's super hard for me to wrap around how massive 576 terabytes worth of storage is..

Just the other day, I finished what I like to call MOAB (Mother of all backups) in preparation for a Backblaze upload.
A backup of every single media files (videos, pictures, music) and documents that my family has ever created and downloaded since the late-2000s.
Absolutely everything is included in it, from copies of old digicam videos, CD / DVD rips, various data from dozens of old phones we owned over the years, scans of physical photo albums, texts, even the random stuff like files I found on forgotten thumb drives. I had to bring various old devices to the repair shop just to extract the data from those old, broken things.

If one of us captured, wrote, or recorded it, then it's in that backup..
From something as important as pictures of me growing up to something as inconsequential as Untitled.txt file containing just the letter 'a' that I made for some reason.
From irreplaceable videos like a wedding vow to an accidental voice record of me butt dialing random contacts from a decade ago..
Every single thing is in there.

And that complete digital history of our lives "only" amounts to just shy of 6 TB ...

576 TB is.... impossible for me to grasp.

First of all 576 TB raw tapes are not out yet. The current generation is 10 which is 30TB raw. The group which keeps peddling LTO tape drives are only implementing smaller incremental gains on tape drive which is supposed to be 36TB for gen 10 LTO tapes.

Second issue is cost. The 30tb LTO tapes is about $300 now in which is about 1/3-1/2 price of the similar hard drive. The previous generation Gen 9 tapes is 18tb raw is about $100 which is about 1/3-1/2 price of a similar hard drive.

 

[leclod]

Second issue is cost. The 30tb LTO tapes is about $300 now in which is about 1/3-1/2 price of the similar hard drive.

I just bought a 24TB drive for 320usd, just saying

 

[SomeoneElse23]

I just bought a 24TB drive for 320usd, just saying

There's a decent chance that tape will last far longer than that drive will.

 

[passivecool]

HDDs must be powered up for data reconstitution every year or so
HDDs therefore are often left 'online', which makes them resource hungry and vulnerable
LTO tapes store cold offline for 20+ years.
And Ethan Hunt can't plug a USB drive into a tape reel on his covert way though the system.

 

[passivecool]

@ Exploding PSU
RESPECT for your MOAB! I'm way behind you there *shame*
A reminder to everyone else here that if it is worth keeping, it needs backups.

Data consumption continues to develop exponentially.
Got a company with, say, 1000 employees and 1 million customers over 20 years - that's a lot of transactional data, access logs and whatever else to archive - and tape can look mighty attractive...

The data sent with the voyager on a 12" phonograph should last about 1bn years. All a matter of priorities.

 

[Tanakoi]

Months after Elon Musk's DOGE crusade to wipe it out, LTO tape storage is bigger than ever

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The entire purpose of this lackwitted -- and highly inaccurate -- headline seems to be to make a backhanded political slap at DOGE and Musk. The tapes being converted certainly weren't modern LTO digital tapes, but the (much) older analog reel and cassette tapes, some of which I know personally are still being used by the Federal Government.

 

[Misgar]

I just bought a 24TB drive for 320usd, just saying

Perhaps it's time for me to upgrade my old LTO-4 SAS drives, but I still have a vast number of empty tapes to fill.

And that complete digital history of our lives "only" amounts to just shy of 6 TB ...

When I come back from a 4 week vacation, I usually have 650GB of RAW + JPG images. They fit nicely on to an 800GB tape.

Then there's the 44,000 Kodachrome slides (transparencies) scanned at 4000 dpi in Nikon NEF format.

Now that I've started shooting 4K GoPro movies, I'm accumulating 12GB video files.

It all adds up and tapes with the write protect tab clicked over are relatively immune from ransomware.

 

[j_123]

The authors on this site are just a bunch of Musk haters. Try someone else, it's getting old.

 

[ravewulf]

I do love when someone who clearly hasn't got a clue what he's talking about is proved wrong (not that it wasn't obvious from the beginning for this particular example). It's amazing that he still has any followers after all the debacles

 

[leclod]

There's a decent chance that tape will last far longer than that drive will.

Yes, each have their advantages and drawbacks.
I believe tape + reader to be quite expensive otherwise I might have tried it

 

[Misgar]

I believe tape + reader to be quite expensive otherwise I might have tried it

Certainly if you buy one of the modern LTO-8 or LTO-9 drives, they're beyond the means of most home users, but you could get an older system at a fraction of the price.

Back in 2018, I bought a second hand LTO-4 half height Quantum SAS tape drive on eBay for the equivalent of US $110. I also bought a full height internal LTO-4 SAS drive for $30.

Around $20 on eBay for an LSI SAS3442E SAS controller card, plus $15 for an external SAS cable and the job was done.

I started off with brand new LTO-4 tapes at between $15 and $20, then bought a large number of barely used tapes for $2 each. I can store up to 800GB (native) on each tape, which is not ideal when backing up multi-Terabyte drives, but acceptable.

These days, I'd suggest a larger capacity LTO-5 or LTO-6 drive, but tape doesn't have to cost and arm and a leg.

 

[hax0red1]

Quoting records for 2024 when Dodge didnt begin working on the problem until after the presidential office transition is a weird way of saying you envy someone.