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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Tapes will make sense to those born in the early 80s but magnetic ribbons have long been replaced by shiny disks, silicon chips and cloud-based storage for whoever wants to store data.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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 25 2019, @06:10PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 25 2019, @06:10PM (#898653)

    I have my original 386sx with MFM drive (the drive is probably broken after a slide down a shelf that collapsed), 486dx(2x33 ceramic and integrated heat sink models, plus a DX4 100!!!) Plus a variety of pentiums.

    The pentiums are almost still usable if you don't have to compile boost/qt/c++11 crap, One of the 486s is too, the rest are dos only boxes for legacy gaming, old apps, etc.

    I was actually just looking at the pentium case the other day because the paint is flaking off and it's gotten a little rust on the frame. But otherwise as a 25 year old computer goes it is in perfect running form.

    I don't know about some of these modern systems, but I intend to replace caps and keep those old guys running well into the next century if network and other parts are available to do so.

    Out of all of them only the 386SX and a VLB 486 are not (definitively) operating. The rest of the boards I've fired up at least once a year to make sure.