Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by laurensr | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

laurensr

I'm still looking for an affordable external tape drive. There's RDX but their tapes seem a lot more expensive per TB.

e.g. LTO 3TB costs 30 EUR RDX 2TB costs 265 EUR

View on HN

RDX is diskbased, not tape based (that is the D in the name)..

https://buy.hpe.com/us/en/storage/disk-storage-systems/remov...

Same issue for me. I need to archive a bunch of data once or twice, put the tape on a shelf in my parents home and then I don't plan to do anything with it unless my NAS self destructs.

Ideally I would be able to rent a tape drive, even if it costs 100 dollars per day it wouldn't really matter.

I've considered getting an external Blu-ray writer and just a bunch of quality inorganic blank discs as a tape alternative archiving solution.

That's exactly what I've been looking into lately.

Did you have any specific discs in mind?

I recently bought "Sony Blu-ray BD-R XL 128GB", but I couldn't find any info whether its organic or inorganic.

Any external BluRay reader/writer you'd recommend? (which supports disks from 25 GB up to the 128 GB you mention)?

The way I've understood it is that BDs are inorganic as long as you don't buy LTH discs.

Are all LTH discs marked on the package or how do I find out if my Bluray discs are LTH?

It should note somewhere that they're LTH discs since they're fundamentally quite different from normal HTL discs.

You might want to consider M-Discs.

AFAIK, M-Discs don't really make a that much of a difference if you're not dealing with DVDs.

Do you mean in comparison to regular BDXL Blurays?

Basically all non-LTH BDs. The way I've understood it, the big selling point in M-Disc DVDs vs. regular DVDs was the inorganic dye used in it. But if you buy a non-LTH BD, you'll have an inorganic dye anyways.

The company that actually made M-Discs also went bust and there's a lot of conflicting information on the Internet whether or not the current M-Discs are real M-Discs or not.

Define "affordable". Lots of LTO-6 drives available for less than US$ 1000:

* https://www.ebay.com/b/LTO-6-Tape-Data-Cartridge-Drives/3997...

Here's an eight-slot SAS library:

* https://www.ebay.com/itm/385724855188

If you intend for your tapes to fit in the library, 20TB for $1000+$200 does not qualify as affordable.

It's reasonably possible to hit a target of 2x hard drive cost with loose tapes but you need a lot of data.

And trying to match the price of hard drives with $10/TB tapes will require piles of data and piles of tapes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com