News Tape Storage Soars While HDD Sales Crash

[Admin]

Sales of LTO tape for archive storage increased in 2022, in contrast to decreases in HDD sales.

Tape Storage Soars While HDD Sales Crash : Read more

 

[plateLunch]

I still have my QIC-80 and Travan tape drives and tapes. Are they going to be making a comeback?

I was cleaning out my old stuff and was wondering if I'll ever need the data that I stored away on those tapes.

 

[donner]

If you really don't want to pay ransomware ransoms, offline (and offsite) backup is the solution and tape is the way to go. So, I don't expect tape to decline any time soon unless something with similar capacity and durability for offline storage comes along.

 

[PiranhaTech]

In the past, the price of tapes was expensive compared to hard drives. I did not see a point to them as a home consumer.

I just saw some recent price of tape, and whoa. It's maybe $60 for a 12 TB tape, and that's a native 12 TB. If the drives were cheaper, I would be tempted. I saw the drives for maybe $3500... nope. However, it would make a lot of sense for the likes of a data center.

 

[rluker5]

I still hold a grudge against tapes because they kept getting chewed with my Ti-99/4A. I'm sure these are a lot better than the audiocassettes I used back then, but I don't need the space that bad.

 

[KE=MV2]

I have to admit I expected the opposite. With the constantly increasing capacity of HDDs, using nearline drives as backup media in an array is fast, and far less costly than in years prior.

 

[Deleted member 14196]

I have to admit I expected the opposite. With the constantly increasing capacity of HDDs, using nearline drives as backup media in an array is fast, and far less costly than in years prior.

Not me, hard drives fail too often tapes are reliable as all get out

tape for backups, especially large back ups is the only way to go and when doing offsite back ups as mentioned above in the real world

hard drives are fine at home

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

Tape & Optical Disc need to be cheap for consumer level backup.

The tech is there to make it cheap, we just need Consumers to get in on "Backing Up" your stuff.

 

[Nikolay Mihaylov]

I wonder if the author has any reference for this claim: the latest LTO-8 tape cartridges with a Strontium Ferrite (SrFe) magnetic layer enable tapes to store up to 580TB of data.

According to WIkipedia, LTO-8 tapes can store up to 12TB of uncompressed data. That's a far cry from 580TB.

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

I wonder if the author has any reference for this claim: the latest LTO-8 tape cartridges with a Strontium Ferrite (SrFe) magnetic layer enable tapes to store up to 580TB of data.

According to WIkipedia, LTO-8 tapes can store up to 12TB of uncompressed data. That's a far cry from 580TB.

I think he's referring to this article:
IBM and Fujifilm demo 580TB tape. Yes it’s a record

 

[Nikolay Mihaylov]

I think he's referring to this article:
IBM and Fujifilm demo 580TB tape. Yes it’s a record

Thanks for the link! It doesn't seem like sth you can buy today. A much more reasonable comparison would be to the highest capacity that can actually be bought today. Any idea what that is?

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

Thanks for the link! It doesn't seem like sth you can buy today. A much more reasonable comparison would be to the highest capacity that can actually be bought today. Any idea what that is?

According to Wikipedia, it's LTO-9 w/ 18 TB Native storage and 45 TB compressed.

 

[Rdslw]

Tape is just THE cheapest way to safely store your stuff for 10+ years. A lot of companies have legal requirement to store stuff for 5+ years, so tape is the way to go, especially as the size densities are insane. I believe my company is using 45TB tapes for backups, and it's like $150 each tape.
it's like last resort, and I believe writing full speed whole 45 TB takes almost 4 days. In my 7 years now with them, we never had to read from them.

 

[Endymio]

Thanks for the link! [580TB] doesn't seem like sth you can buy today.

According to Fuji's roadmap, it's a Gen-12 product, whereas they're only at Gen 9 now. So probably a decade away still.

 

[bit_user]

I believe writing full speed whole 45 TB takes almost 4 days.

Rebuilding a RAID, on the larger HDDs available today, is also getting to be a multi-day affair.

In my 7 years now with them, we never had to read from them.

I hope you've tested it, though? Unless you've tested your backup strategy, you don't have a backup strategy!

Presumably, you reuse the tapes? How many times can you reliably rewrite one of those tapes?

 

[iconoclasthero]

So what would be a reasonable $350 tape drive for a home server? If you've already looked into it...

In the past, the price of tapes was expensive compared to hard drives. I did not see a point to them as a home consumer.

I just saw some recent price of tape, and whoa. It's maybe $60 for a 12 TB tape, and that's a native 12 TB. If the drives were cheaper, I would be tempted. I saw the drives for maybe $3500... nope. However, it would make a lot of sense for the likes of a data center.

I signed up to ask where you saw a $350 drive that was too spendy for $5/TB. Of by an order of magnitude in what I thought I read, lol. I actually looked into used units a while back, but I don't remember how far I got since I didn't know the technology at all.

 

[Rdslw]

Presumably, you reuse the tapes? How many times can you reliably rewrite one of those tapes?

Yes, but I don't know how many. We have a machine to degauss and rewind them, I know we retired some that cracked casing, but otherwise they last literal forever. It takes like 10 min to empty it and start anew, and I cannot remember if any tapes failed after. Only one I recall came broken straight from the box.
I believe they are rated for 150 or 200 full passes, and I would be surprised if we were over 15.