51–60 of 105 posts
I remember really wanting one of these but I'm not really sure for what purpose. The idea of a substantial amount of data off a HDD seemed very appealing, and it was around that time where 1.44mb floppies were no longer sufficient but most people didn't have a CD-RW drive yet. Later in the 90s as CD-RW drives replaced CD-ROM drives there wasn't really a need for Zip drives. So it seems like to me they had an extremel…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> why don't we ever see pro-sumer priced tape drives? The technology behind capable LTO drives is now more than 10 years old, shouldn't we see some reductions in price now First, LTO drives are conceptually simple, but if you've ever opened one up you'll know they are a feat of horribly complex engineering. Second, they are not a commodity product. Infact thanks to the magic cloud they are even LESS of a commodity pr…
> Second, they are not a commodity product. Are you sure, there's millions of small-to-medium businesses that could use a good and cheap backup solution for terabytes of data.
Yes, and that's exactly how small-to-medium business IT used to operate.
These days sadly most small-to-medium businesses are drinking the cloud koolaid.
You would be hard pushed to find a small-biz with a comms room these days, when back in the day every half-decent small-biz office would have a comms room with cab and a few servers in it.
Now most small-biz are on Microsoft or Gmail for mail and their office is full of laptops on WiFi.... nobody has any respect for good old-fashioned structured cabling these days either, sadly. ;(
It is what it is, sadly.
Hence only governments, enterprises and, ironically (if rumours are correct) the cloud providers (for their archival S3 products) are still buying tape.
TL ; DR Floppy disks were tiny and slow Zip drives in 1995 were around $200 and 100MB disk for about $20 CD-R burners in 1995 were $1000 and blank CD-R were about $15 each By 1999 CD-R burners were around $125 and blank discs were around $1 and dropping fast. I remember when they were $0.10 for a 700MB disc in the 2000s
Drives like these and the Syquest drives were essential for desktop publishing well into the early 2000s. I sent many such drives to various printing facilities --- or, sometimes (and, here, I really date myself) separate PostScript bureaus --- to obtain high-res, color-separated film for four-color commercial printing, either by local printers or magazines who would run ads for my employers of the time.
For a while I badly wanted a zip drive or the (syquest) ez 135 for personal use. But by the time I could afford that stuff I had a scsi board and cd writer… which was clearly the way.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> why don't we ever see pro-sumer priced tape drives? The technology behind capable LTO drives is now more than 10 years old, shouldn't we see some reductions in price now First, LTO drives are conceptually simple, but if you've ever opened one up you'll know they are a feat of horribly complex engineering. Second, they are not a commodity product. Infact thanks to the magic cloud they are even LESS of a commodity pr…
> Second, they are not a commodity product. Are you sure, there's millions of small-to-medium businesses that could use a good and cheap backup solution for terabytes of data.
My experience with tape is very out of date but I doubt much has changed due to the nature of tape
Tape software sucks. Tape restores are cumbersome. A SMB can literally but a multi TB HDD and just drag and drop, and but the drive in a safe.
A SMB will need to hire someone who wants to deal with this niche tape storage, and why would they bother if they can use a NAS for that and a dozen other things at the same time
Tapes can have a shelf life of 30 years. If you need archival storage then tape is a great solution. For everybody else it’s more trouble than it’s worth.
I bought one of these. In those days, I could keep the JDK in a box of floppies or it could fit in one Zip. Unfortunately, you had to carry your drive with you, because few people had one. So it only really made sense as backup media for me.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Second, they are not a commodity product. Are you sure, there's millions of small-to-medium businesses that could use a good and cheap backup solution for terabytes of data.
Backup to NAS is a much better solution for a SMB My experience with tape is very out of date but I doubt much has changed due to the nature of tape Tape software sucks. Tape restores are cumbersome. A SMB can literally but a multi TB HDD and just drag and drop, and but the drive in a safe. A SMB will need to hire someone who wants to deal with this niche tape storage, and why would they bother if they can use a NAS…
Nowadays probably would need an USB converter, assuming everything still works.