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If you have 500TB of tape, the chances are that you are reading at least one tape while also needing to write stuff.

I've personally never experienced that scale, I'm sure the industry has some recommended ratio of drives to tapes.

When I evaluated this, it was all about read and write access patterns. So much data coming in for so much amount of time, that needs so much validation, and will be restored so many times in the next few years, etc. It's pretty easy if you know your data flows, but when it's a big question mark, you just kind of throw hardware at it and fix the bottlenecks when they come up. We usually wrote more than we read, but we absolutely needed to keep read capacity open.

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