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Comment by bombcar | Hacker News Reader

There's still TAPE drives out there, but nowhere near as many as there were, and they're expensive.

You could make a Walkman; it'd cost $3-10k each.

Tape now is very niche - it’s for data archival purposes, and often only exists for regulatory reasons. This is why it is ludicrously expensive- it only needs to be cheaper than the next credible commercially available alternative, which only needs to offset the risk of going to jail for malicious malpractice.

The LTO-10 can hold 30 TB of highly compressed data on one cassette, and will last at least 30 years without degradation (probably longer under optimal conditions). This is still useful for many things. It does take almost a full day to fill up a tape, though, so if you're trying to back up a lot of stuff fast you're probably just going back to SSDs.

The M-disc is a better option for most use cases-- but if you have a ton of data that needs archiving, the tape involves less human labor and less physical space, which is I guess how the high prices are justified for those 'niche' applications.

I imagine the typical tape user doesn’t get individual drives and instead gets fancy tiered storage servers that include ludicrously fat network pipes, RAM, flash, HDDs and tape libraries, where tapes are fed and removed to an off site location every day, hopefully to never be seen again (because, if you need those tapes, it’s because something really bad happened to your data - the servers is plan A, the library is plan B, and getting it from offsite storage is plan C).

There are lots of portable cassette players on the market, starting at 20€ or less.

Only low quality. But yes, building better quality shouldn’t cost $ 10k

They are as good as the price the market wants to pay for them. There is a match at $20, but not much more than that.

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