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Comment by tired_man | Hacker News Reader

Beats me. I've never dealt with fractional station wagons before...

A compressed LTO6 is 6.25 TB, right? Let's just go with 3 of them.

So, I figured out how many carts we need. You calculate the fractional station wagon part. My math was never _that_ good ;-)

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Just as a point of reference, a single LTO6 tape costs around $25-$35 only. So we're talking about $105 at absolute most for three.

That is likely to be cheaper than a 16 TB SSD for a very long time to come. Tapes aren't going anywhere.

That's the problem, tape isn't going anywhere. A decade back, it boasted a huge capacity advantage. Now with all the newer tech, the spinning media storage advantages, etc, it can barely hold a big drives worth of data. And the tape drives are expensive... Lto7 should hold like 50T on a this and dollar tape drive to look really interesting again.

At scale, tape still has the lowest cost per byte of any storage medium.

It's true for sufficiently large values of “at scale” but tape has uniquely high overhead costs – hardware, software, staffing – which have to be balanced out by those lower storage costs. HDD/SSD costs have been declining at a much faster rate so we're already at the point where only the largest storage consumers are going to reach the point where they see a return from the initial investment in tape.

LTO-7 is 6.4TB uncompressed. LTO-10 is 48TB.

Hopefully we'll see LTO-7 this year but probably in 2016. That puts the diff between LTO6 and LTO7 at 4 years.

Extrapolating... LTO8 in 2020 LTO9 in 2024 LTO10 in 2028

LTO-10 would have ideally come in 2020 in keeping with LTO's earlier pace of 2 years per revision which is also more in line with storage increases

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