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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Tapes will make sense to those born in the early 80s but magnetic ribbons have long been replaced by shiny disks, silicon chips and cloud-based storage for whoever wants to store data.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: 1) by nitehawk214 on Wednesday September 25 2019, @04:06PM

    by nitehawk214 (1304) on Wednesday September 25 2019, @04:06PM (#898586)

    Except that your cheap $60 LTO-7 tapes need a $3000 dollar reader to be used.

    --
    "Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh