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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday September 25 2019, @01:12PM   Printer-friendly
from the tape-that dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

There's one crucial way tape still trounces SSDs and hard drives when it comes to storage...

Tapes will make sense to those born in the early 80s but magnetic ribbons have long been replaced by shiny disks, silicon chips and cloud-based storage for whoever wants to store data.

But don't discount them yet. Even if LTO-8 tapes are now in stock, you can buy cheap LTO-7, reformat them to M8 and get 9TB of native storage (22.5TB compressed). You can grab one (HPE LTO 7 Tape with Barium Ferrite (BaFe) C7977A) for just under $59.

With an uncompressed capacity of 9TB, it translates into a per TB cost of $6.55, about 12x less than the cheapest SSD on the market and 1/4 the price of the 12TB Seagate Exos X14, currently the most affordable hard disk drive on the market on a per TB basis.

In other words, if you want a LOT of capacity, then tape is the obvious answer (although truth be said, you also need to factor in the cost of the drive). 

But there's something else that tape offers that no other storage medium currently offers and that's on-the-fly, transparent compression which can go up to 2.5:1 and works best on text files (rather than multimedia which is already heavily compressed).

As for transfer speeds, they can reach 300MBps (that's 1.08TB per hour) which is plenty fast, just a tad slower than the just-reviewed PNY Pro Elite which tops 375MBps.

Tape that!


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  • (Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Wednesday September 25 2019, @02:00PM (7 children)

    by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us (6553) on Wednesday September 25 2019, @02:00PM (#898490) Journal

    As to real costs.... Never used an HPE tape drive, although I have used several different formats in my life.

    A quick Google shows most drive prices are around $3000 (saw one for $1200 but other more cheaper ones were upgrade kits apparently...)

    $3,000 + $590 (10 tapes at that price) = $3,590

    Switching to Tandberg RDX hard drive cartridges (push in-out SATA-to-USB3 or straight SATA drives in a very convenient and easy-to-use for backup format):

    $177 single drive + $1,588 (10 1 TB cartrdiges) = $2,765

    For our applications rolling at 22 GB per hour on backup is quite sufficient.

    Granted, if I needed 9 GB of offline storage (or more than 1 TB / day) the tape option would be better than RDX, even with drive cost figured in. The breakeven seems somewhere between 1 and 2 TB. But I don't.

    If I did, as DannyB suggested, regular external hard drives FTW. 4 GB can be found as low as $60 and high as $149 - let's split the difference and say $100. Quantity 3 4GB drives at $100 = $300 * 10 = $3,000 and yields 3 TB more per unit for storage. Still way under tape drive costs.

    I'm sure, as asserted, one can make a case for when tape drives make sense still. If not, they wouldn't exist and would go by the wayside like ZIP drives, MOD's and many other obsolete storage formats. But it's far from a universal cost-volume-time win. Otherwise we'd all still be using them, eh?

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  • (Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Wednesday September 25 2019, @02:01PM (2 children)

    by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us (6553) on Wednesday September 25 2019, @02:01PM (#898493) Journal

    If I needed more than 9 TB, not GB. :)

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    • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday September 25 2019, @02:39PM

      by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday September 25 2019, @02:39PM (#898515) Journal

      Back in the day, even 1 TB was a distant dream. And it was uphill both ways!

      --
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    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday September 25 2019, @03:29PM

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Wednesday September 25 2019, @03:29PM (#898550)

      It's 0K, the exponent keeps moving up and it's hard to adjust.

      I think when I was doing the tape drive backup scheme in the early 1990s, our removable hard drives (custom things, not easy to source off the shelf) held something like 80 Megabytes, which we would consolidate onto tape for storage at the central data processing site.

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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 25 2019, @02:29PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 25 2019, @02:29PM (#898509)

    Is there any good reason for tape drives to cost $3,000? It's an enterprise product so they can get away with that pricing. If there was a tape resurgence, maybe a cheaper consumer tape drive could be sold.

    If HDDs can get to 100 TB [tomshardware.com] quickly, they can remain cheaper per TB than SSDs and retain bulk storage supremacy for consumers. Even if the gap narrows, QLC NAND data retention is too scary.

    • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday September 25 2019, @02:42PM

      by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday September 25 2019, @02:42PM (#898518) Journal

      Back in the day, I don't remember what drives cost. I think tapes were about $70 each. But even if we spent in the mid four figures on a backup system, including a spare tape drive unit, that was CHEAP compared to losing the actual data.

      How much is your data worth?

      Stop and think about it. Really.

      We were mostly thinking about fire or tornado. Office equipment and PCs can be replaced. But that data WAS our business.

      --
      People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
    • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Wednesday September 25 2019, @04:29PM

      by TheRaven (270) on Wednesday September 25 2019, @04:29PM (#898605) Journal
      Being an enterprise product doesn't just mean price gouging, it means that they're low volume. This has always been the killer for tape. Disk and tape R&D are both expensive, but hard disks can amortise that cost and all other fixed costs over 100 or more times as many units shipped. If your hard disk cost includes $10 to cover fixed costs in R&D, building the factory, and so on then a tape drive that costs the same to make per unit will need to add $1,000 to the final price. In practice, this number is lower for the disk, but the multiplier for tape is higher.
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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday September 25 2019, @03:26PM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Wednesday September 25 2019, @03:26PM (#898547)

    one can make a case for when tape drives make sense still.

    Sure, they have much greater application in arts and crafts projects when the defunct media is given to the local kindergarten to dismantle and play with.

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