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Comment by funstuff007 | Hacker News Reader

LTO does seem to be the last bastion of closed source vendor lock-in. That being said, even if prices dropped by 75%, I'm not sure our shop would look to do LTO instead of a series of hard drives. 20 TB hard drives are now $400.

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If you fall in the right place on the curve $75 / LTO-8 cartridge still makes a lot of sense. It doesn’t take many $400 hard drives to make up the price for a tape element at that per-cartridge price. (Assuming you can deal with sequential access, etc.)

Nothing prevents you from using open source software with LTO, which is a multi vendor format. You can read tapes written with an IBM drive with a Quantum drive...

LTO 8 tapes are 80$ or so, formatted as LTO8M in a LTO9 drive they hold 15TB uncompressed. LTO7 are like 30$ and hold 9TB uncompressed in LTO7M format.

Hdds are soo fragile. They constantly break. A proper 3-2-1 backup solution is incomplete without tape IMHO.

At least HDDs are fast, cheap, don't have massive up-front investments. You can take a couple of HDDs, RAID them together for reliability and you can still write and read data at humane speeds.

A RAID array isn't a backup. Your data is still live on it, an "rm -rf" away from destruction. HDDs fare poorly when shelved for a long time, RAID are even worse in that regard. OTOH a tape on a shelf is perfectly safe for 5 to 10 years or more (I recently restored 1998/99 sensitive data from LTO2 tapes written in 2003).

>A RAID array isn't a backup.

Who said it was?

>Your data is still live on it, an "rm -rf" away from destruction.

How is accidental deletion not a problem with tapes?

Unless you store your tapes right next to your cache of neodymium magnets, that should be pretty easy. Writing to a tape is very deliberate generally. Much more than writing to disks.

With current software and hardware RAID solutions, we also have massive up-front cost. We can't buy drives as needed and add them to the system one at a time.

I wish it was easier to incrementally expand capacity of RAID setups. ZFS promises RAID-Z expansion but it still hasn't been released. Btrfs has a flexible block allocator that supports incremental expansion as well as heterogeneous drive pools but unfortunately the parity support cannot be relied upon to this day.

RAID is not reliable.

Source: Former HPE Storage dev.

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