41–49 of 49 posts
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. --Tanenbaum
There was a story out there a while back of a backup company migrating data centers who did just that. Packed up a vehicle full of hard drives and took a road trip.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. --Tanenbaum
I would love a low cost tape backup solution for home use. I would put things on it that I normally would delete (but may theoretically need at a later stage). This could range anything from written material (small size) to raw 4k video material that normally would require fairly expensive storage. What tape solutions like these are available right now at a decent cost? Thinking sizes up to 50TB, so conventional disk…
Define "low cost". You won't get away with spending less than $1,500 or so on a recent generation tape drive. Don't forget you need a SCSI card. This is the point at which most enthusiasts just turn around, walk home, and order a big stack of hard disks. Sure, you get to save a bunch of money on media. An LTO-6 cartridge costs $25, and that's 2.5TB. But tape is a pain in the ass, and since it has separate capex for t…
For a business however (if I had huge amounts of data that needed archiving i.e. >100TB) then I would definitely go the tape route. Or Glacier if I decided to be sensible.
I would love a low cost tape backup solution for home use. I would put things on it that I normally would delete (but may theoretically need at a later stage). This could range anything from written material (small size) to raw 4k video material that normally would require fairly expensive storage. What tape solutions like these are available right now at a decent cost? Thinking sizes up to 50TB, so conventional disk…
About a year ago, I was going through some boxes at my parents house. There was a box of 5.25 DS disks holding backups of my important data. The only copy. Like all the Qic 40 tapes and Zip disks and most of the CD's and DVD's, they wound up in the trash.
For me, backing up personal stuff onto some technology has been mostly an exercise in spending time and money deleting it. I guess the practical heuristic is that if I can live with it being offline, I will live if I delete it. And the moral of the story is that deleting it sooner rather than later is cheaper.
Tape is a great technology when it makes money. It is a lousy consumer technology. Ebay shows me one "qic 40 drive." It's only twenty years later.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Define "low cost". You won't get away with spending less than $1,500 or so on a recent generation tape drive. Don't forget you need a SCSI card. This is the point at which most enthusiasts just turn around, walk home, and order a big stack of hard disks. Sure, you get to save a bunch of money on media. An LTO-6 cartridge costs $25, and that's 2.5TB. But tape is a pain in the ass, and since it has separate capex for t…
You had me at the 2nd paragraph. I'm also one of those who'll turn around and order a stack of HDD's. Capex is just too high. I find it quite funny that you think 50TB is considered "small amounts of data", but I suppose all is relative. For a business however (if I had huge amounts of data that needed archiving i.e. >100TB) then I would definitely go the tape route. Or Glacier if I decided to be sensible.
Putting a few of their numbers together seems to imply a read bandwidth of 24 Tbps (330 terabytes = 330*8 terabits/tape, tape length = 1098 meters => 2.4 terabits/meter, tape speed = 10 m/s => 24 Tb/s). Which to me is way more interesting than the total storage size. Of course I have no idea what you could actually feed that into, it far exceeds CPU memory bandwidth, let alone SCSI or PCIE. Do these things not actual…
We're no where near 330TB tapes. This was an announcement that they were able to, in a lab, make a few inches of what would be a 330TB tape. The idea is that when we're at a place where you can reliably manufacture 330TB tapes, fibre channel (or whatever we have then for SAN interconnects) will have caught up.
Too much risk that people confuse it with music cassettes?
Or perhaps too fiddly software to deal with? for me a more likely reason why USB drives overtook optical media than the media itself, btw.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hard to say. That type of capacity isn't even on the LTO road map yet, and IBM is one of the controlling companies there. LTO-7 currently holds about 6TB uncompressed, and they're about $100 per cartridge. LTO-8 will double the storage, and will probably be available by the end of next year. I'd guess the cartridges will be more expensive initially, but it's hard to say what the premium will be.
> will probably be available by the end of next year. I'd be surprised if it took that long.