Comment by kstrauser | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kstrauser | Hacker News Reader

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Wow, this reminded me that tape drives exist.

The best value HD on that list, among ones I'd want to buy for NAS use, is a Seagate 28TB for $480. An LTO-9 tape is 45TB for $90. I found a USB-C (because why not) LTO-9 drive for $6,499.

The crossover price is at 448TB, where the total cost of 16 HD drives is $7,680, but tape drive + 10 tapes is "only" $7,399.

Huh. That's a lot lower than I would've expected. That's a very manageable price for the kind of business that wants someone to take a backup offsite nightly, and is probably a whole awful lot more robust for that kind of regular transportation.

Those tapes are actually 18 TB so you need more to break even. Also 24 TB drives have been on sale for ~$250 occasionally.

True that, but also those 28TB disks are actually 25TB. So the break even point moves back.

If you're trying to compare equivalent units-of-measure of terabyte (10^12) vs tebibyte (2^40), it's:

  28TB (HDD) vs 18TB (LTO-9)
  ... or ...
  25TiB (HDD) vs 16.37TiB (LTO-9)

The 25Tib shouldn't be compared with gp's clarification of 18TB raw uncompressed capacity.

https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/ts4500-tape-library?topic=cartri...

Yeah, tape is alive and kicking for business use.

Automated tape libraries add a few grand to the total, but you get the added benefit of not having to change tapes daily.

My only concern is that tape speeds are stagnating around a terabyte per hour, while you can somewhat parallelize jobs with multi-drive libraries, it increases cost and complexity significantly.

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