The annoying thing is that the drives are so expensive.
What's in a LTO drive that costs so much to make, and why can't it cost the same as a hard disk? When I think of it a hard disk seems rather more complicated.
What's in a LTO drive that costs so much to make, and why can't it cost the same as a hard disk? When I think of it a hard disk seems rather more complicated.
And the guts of one don't look that much more complicated than a VCR. Does the head cost $3000 or something?
NRE: non-recurring engineering expenses. Every product needs to be researched and designed before manufacturing. Take all of those costs and divide by the number sold (which in the case of tape drives is very low).
The TCO of tape only makes sense at scale, and is much harder to assess than HDDs, as tape cost includes media, drives and libraries, each of which have different life times. Tape libraries can be used across many tape generations.
I wonder if IBM is going to introduce a new generation of 3592, or is LTO the “last man standing” too?
The latest IBM 3592 drive generation (20TB uncompressed), came out in 2018. At the time, their roadmap had future generations promising 30, 40, 80 TB capacity-but I’m thinking, five years on, if they were going to deliver any of that, surely they would have by now?
I mean I found that nearly instantly and there are probably others.
But backups aren’t a “one and done” you want to keep doing them.