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Comment by nxobject | Hacker News Reader

I've been down "LTO at home?" rabbit-hole... I nearly ended up buying a SAS HBA, until I realized that S3 Glacier is tape-as-a-service.

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S3 is too expensive to do a restore from. And you have to restore to verify.

It isn't too expensive for my use case – per month, I retrieve about 500GB a month from Glacier Instant Retrieval to verify, which costs ~$15. Combined with other costs, my monthly bill is ~$50.

I used to use Backblaze B2, which had cheaper egress at the cost of slightly more expensive storage (I think ~$5/TB/mo, with free egress up to 3x all current storage?) So I paid $20. But at some point AWS opened a datacenter near me, and I couldn't ignore how much faster data transfers got.

It's ok when it's 0.5TB but we're at about 900TB.

The point is the cost doesn't scale well.

Depending on the amount of data you have, might it not be less expensive than build the tape drive?

An LTO drive is easily $10.000. You can restore a lot of S3 data for that amount of money. Sadly getting cheaper tape options is not really possible anymore.

I paid < $400 for my LTO5

I assume used. Sadly I'm not really in a market where that type of equipment is widely available second hand.

Yeah used with 1 year warranty.

Ah that sucks :(

>Depending on the amount of data you have, might it not be less expensive than build the tape drive?

Rule #25: Try to avoid making what one may purchase, as the total cost is often many times higher than first assumed.

It is tempting for many, but often doesn't end well for businesses. =3

use cloudflare's r2, no egress fees

I have LTO at home. It's great. There's something about tape, especially LTO, that just lets me sleep easy at night

AWS is an option up to 30TiB, but also feeds into the over-provisioned data-center market pressures. The recent "rclone --gui" solution does bestow rsync/sshfs like features for Windows users now, and remote mounts are easier/cleaner to bring up. =3

Just bought an LTO drive yesterday (after failing to cool its predecessor properly - dont be like me). They got more expensive more or less in line with HDDs :(

Used Tape drives often had the write heads service hours go well past its recommended limits. Mission critical IT systems don't get "upgraded" off schedule very often. ymmv

Anecdotally, I have seen Tape sets fail in production settings, as a remote office location admin was doing incremental backups... and the sick tape drive kept silently damaging each daily roll-back attempt. They may fail ungracefully in an archival context.

I do not deny a janky BD-R drive option is situation specific, but for small projects I am fine with a 25GB disc $25.80/TiB solution with the occasional big file $62.42/TiB hit for 100G/128G EOL discs.

HDD are less hassle, still hit below $34.63/TiB, and last a few years. Not a bad fall back option if you still have old inventory. =3

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