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Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

Nearly. It has the benefit of being random access, but for backup purposes it has the disadvantage of 1) being online (usually), 2) high per-drive overhead (even with huge SAS JBODs chained together), 3) shorter lifespan.

Of course nobody wants to deal with the difficulties of tape, and tapes have not kept up with the density of drives, either.

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LTO-7 is 6TB/tape, at ~$115/tape (on sale[0]). The cheapest 6TB HDD on newegg is a refurbished WD Red for $198[1].

[0]https://www.tapeandmedia.com/hp-lto-7-tape-ultrium-tapes-c79...

[1]http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIAAY949U33...

But the cost of the drives is extravagant. Not anywhere near the price point for individual use.

And for enterprise use, a tape drive doesn't make sense unless it is part of a tape changer. Fortunately, the drives are so expensive that the cost of the changer is marginal in comparison.

Even then, you can get a used (still good, for a couple years at least) LTO-5 drive for around 200-250 EUR. The tapes cost about 20-25 EUR each and are good for 1.5 TB -- with a small tape library you'd break even over hard drives beyond maybe ~20 TB.

Remember, as disks get better, so will tape - the technology isn't the same, but similar enough that advances in one will certainly cause similar advances in the other.

I've built an archival application that can turn off individual drives at will and full JBODs too. That makes the disk "off line". Useful for people who don't want to have any tapes. The application works with tapes too anyway :)

That's a really cool system, and absolutely great for power consumption. For backup purposes, if the drive can be turned on without a physical unlock, IMHO it's not truly offline, as an attacker could still cause data loss without physical infiltration.

We're going to dead end soon with SSD's right? Once we get to a certain density. Then what? You can't get any 'better' than that, like you did going from paper tape to magnetic tape to disks to flash

Here's Intel's bet on the next generation of storage tech beyond Flash: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_XPoint

my understanding is that mram cells can scale down to smaller process sizes than flash cells.

It appears the (SSD) answer is "3D stacking" and I have no idea where that might end...

Don't HDDs also have more bitrot than tape?

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