LTO Tape Storage

You can buy a tabletop LTO tape drive, a SAS HBA card and an appropriate cable and you can use them with any desktop computer with a free big enough PCIe slot.The problem is that while the tapes are at least 3 times cheaper than HDDs, and you have other additional advantages, e.g. much higher sequential reading/writing speed and much longer storage lifetime of the tape, the tape drives are extremely expensive, at a few thousand $, usually above $3k.You can find tape drives for obsolet

To clarify. a tape reader is about 5k, a tape is cheaper than a hard drive at the same storage capacity and can be stored for a long time without issue.

Tape is a scam. PERIOD.I see LTO-8 drives sell for $3500 or so. LTO-8 tapes seem to be selling for about $120 or so today (although I couldn't find them a year ago back when a patent war was keeping them off the market)The LTO-8 tape has 12 TB capacity. I see 12TB hard drives selling for $270. You save $150 using a tape instead of a hard drive, so you have to replace 23 disks with tapes to make back the cost of the drive, or a total of 276 GB of storage.My experience is that

I'm surprised it's not LTO tapes. They are at least twice as dense as HDDs, lighter, and cheaper, and, for something like this, all you need is sequential access.

The LTO tapes are dirt cheap.Only the tape drives are extremely expensive (thousands of $).If you have hundreds of TB of data, LTO, including the cost of the drive, becomes cheaper than HDDs.The QIC tape cartridges had the problem that the rubber belt which moves the tape disintegrates after a number of years, making them unreadable without special equipment.The LTO tapes have a much longer lifetime.

There are at least 2 manufacturers for tapes (Fujifilm and Sony), but their tapes are also sold under many other brands (e.g. IBM, Quantum, HP).The price per TB is currently about $7 or less (per real TB of LTO-8, not per marketing compressed TB), so there is no chance to approach the cost and reliability of tapes using HDDs.The problem with tapes is that currently the tape drives are very expensive, because their market is small, so you need to store a lot of data before the difference in

Why? Hard drives are as cheap as tape now: $10/TB. Tapes are sequential access media, wear out, and malfunction, whereas hard drives are random access media. I know all about StorageTek silos and 4U tape robots but still don't bother with them.

Tape is still very cost effective. Load latency might be a few minutes though

The true cost of tape is that of the tape drive.Tapes themselves are pretty darn cheap. LTO-5 tapes cost $25 for 1.5TB (uncompressed). Multi-layer Blu-Ray is the only solution that is anywhere close to that cheap... but those are a pain-in-the-ass to use. (You'll need Thirty 50GB Blu-Rays to do the job of a single LTO-5 tape)Also consider: At x8, BluRays are written at 36 MB/s. Tape Drives are read/written to at 140MB/s, making them much faster than BluRays.The probl

Tape is $5 per TB at retail and you can safely store data on it for at least 10 years, after which you may need to make a new copy not due to the risk of aging, but due to the risk of no longer finding new tape drives compatible with the tape format.Your price of $10/TB might apply when HDDs are purchased in bulk, because at retail I see prices between $15/TB and $20/TB.No HDD may be trusted to store data for more than 5 years and this duration is valid only for the more exp