News Tape Storage Trundles On, Increases Yearly Volume to 128 Exabytes

[Admin]

The LTO Program, a collection of companies specializing in tape storage media, today announced a YoY increase in shipments, showcasing an increasing demand momentum that runs counter to the general computing market.

Tape Storage Trundles On, Increases Yearly Volume to 128 Exabytes : Read more

 

[cyrusfox]

Still an Industry/enterprise niche.

I like the stability of offline hard storage, but have you looked at the price of an external Tape drive... Not going to be used by consumers any time soon. You can get LTO4/5/6 for a couple Hundred on ebay, missing out on the speed and capacity of the newer drives as well as most are SAS backplane... Maybe I'll pick up some discount LTO9 in 8 years or will it be entirely redundant by then? These speeds are much better than micro SD cards with a lot more shelf stability.

 

[Co BIY]

Tape is an appropriate storage medium for a large "Store Now, Crack later" enterprise.

 

[kanewolf]

Still an Industry/enterprise niche.

I like the stability of offline hard storage, but have you looked at the price of an external Tape drive... Not going to be used by consumers any time soon. You can get LTO4/5/6 for a couple Hundred on ebay, missing out on the speed and capacity of the newer drives as well as most are SAS backplane... Maybe I'll pick up some discount LTO9 in 8 years or will it be entirely redundant by then? These speeds are much better than micro SD cards with a lot more shelf stability.

Home users don't want to deal with the enterprise interfaces of tape drives. Fiber channel, maybe SAS. Not interfaces that are convenient for home or desktop users.

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

The biggest problem is the single reel design of LTO Tape Cassettes.

Depending on the machine to "Not Screw Up" and eat your tape and forcing a complicated method to open up the machine to get your tape out.

That's a big No/No in terms of end user simplicity and reliability.

I prefer the old 2 Reel Tape Cassettes with integral Spools/Reels.

Alot of the major issues is the fundamental designs are targeted towards complicated Enterprise Tape machines instead of building high reliability / simple tape mechanisms mimic-ing Digital Cassette Tapes that don't tug on the tape reel from the cassette

 

[markhahn]

Home users don't want to deal with the enterprise interfaces of tape drives. Fiber channel, maybe SAS. Not interfaces that are convenient for home or desktop users.

tape isn't aimed at consumers. it really only makes sense in large libraries in datacenters,
since otherwise, the expense of the drives are never amortized by the price difference between tape media and disk drives.

arguably, the market shows that consumers don't really care about data, and if they do, they put it into datacenters.