Why Are Tape Drives So Expensive?

[chjade84]

We are looking into getting a new tape drive for our company as we have overflowed our current tape capacity. I was looking at the cost of 600-800GB drives and the things are in the $2,000-$3,000 range (not to mention the media)! Clearly this isn't new technology, why is it so expensive? No one seems to know!

Is it simply a matter of knowing most all large capacity drives are used for business and therefore they can charge whatever they want? Am I missing something?

We can't afford to spend that much on a new drive but tape is apparently the only option. (I won't go into detail of why this is the case).

Oh well...

...I feel better now

 

[kamel5547]

Lookign back a little all over the map ont his post 😛

The technology is new (I jumped at the chance to upgrade). You could buy a a lower capacity drive, that technology is not new and should be fairly affordable now. There are constant innovations in tape capacity, much like there are in hard drive capacity, the largest capacity is always premium price.

If you want a cheaper alternative look for an older tape library but the media costs will eat up the savings fairly quickly. I bought a HP ML2024 (800/1.6TB tape library this year, and the cost savings in media alone will pay for it over one year (compared to our old 160/320). Yes you pay a lot up front, but if you do the math on the media of backing up to cheaper upfront cost devices the cost difference doesn't last very long.

Are you actually using straight drives? You should invest in a library, since it auto-rotates media its life span is far longer than a single drive (i.e. you backup capacity is slots*media capacity). You can get an HP 8-slot for around 5,000 (800GB/1.6TB), which would give you 6.4/12.8 TB of back-up before having to touch the media... (also bought this for another location).

Mya dvice is this: put together a spreadhseet with the following:
1. Backup capcity needed.
2. Media Costs
3. Storage growth (esitmate)

Then look at various scenarios (use formulas to avoid having to type the numbers multiple times) to see waht makes sense. If your storage growth rate is much more than 25% per year odds are a library makes sense.

 

[malveaux]

Heya,

Well, there's a lot of reasons it's expensive. But if you consider the actual cost per year, it's not that expensive, so long as the data you're backing up is actually important (obviously not good for your porn collection or mp3's).

First and foremost, it's just not that big in demand on the market. There's other backup solutions. But they just don't need to mass supply these things because of the billions of computer users, only an extremely tiny amount of them (businesses mostly) actually need to truly back things up, and in doing so, would look towards Tape backups. They don't need to buy them continuously. They just buy them for a fat price (honestly, the cost of a good drive is not that expensive if you consider the cost of your lost data), and they're set for years. It's not like they have to buy a new one every year. Again, demand and supply are much different in the backup world. And they know that corporate/business use of these things are not like the enthusiast PC gaming market, who wants new stuff every 6 months and are willing to pay for it.

Compare the cost of those things to a computer and non-stop purchasing of Harddrives. Then, compare how well HDD's stand up to long term use/storage and their resilience to damage. Then compare how often you successfully can get your backed up data successfully. The cost isn't too different. But the survivability of data is pretty different.

Very best,

 

[Nik_I]

you should consider a drobo or something similar to that. the device is a bit expensive and it doesn't even come with the hard drives, but it's constantly backing up your data so in the case that one of the drives inside goes bad, you won't actually lose any data.

 

[einstein4pres]

but tape is apparently the only option. (I won't go into detail of why this is the case).

Nik_I, what you are suggesting is
1) NAS, not tape
2) designed for home or SoHo use, not what OP is talking about.

 

[chjade84]

Yea, they really want something that can be backed up daily and taken to another location. AFIK tape is the only viable option for daily transport. Optical disks don't hold enough, hard disks are too prone to damage, SSD is still a bit weird as well as expensive, FTP to a remote site... (120GB over 750kbps...). If there are any other options that keep a library of a few weeks and can be transported safely I'd love to hear about them.

Nik_I, I did set up a NAS for our more static data. Saved us $1,400 over upgrading the server drives and got us 4x more space.

We are a small company so expenses are magnified. We'll have to do something sometime though as we are close to running out of hours in the day to physically write to multiple tapes.

I was just wondering if the drives were so expensive because of some advanced technology or if it was more of a economics issue of supply and demand. Sounds like the latter.

Thanks!

 

[Godiwa]

hmm are you doing FULL backups daily? or partial? 120gig a day is a lot of "must save" data especially for a small company (again depending on what kinda data it is)