
Tape still beats SSDs and hard drives when it comes to price per byte - jaytaylor
https://www.techradar.com/news/theres-one-crucial-way-tape-still-trounces-ssds-and-hard-drives-when-it-comes-to-storage
======
jonah-archive
If folks are curious about the benefits/drawbacks/etc of the medium, I would
highly recommend checking out the media presentations given at the Library of
Congress Designing Storage Architectures meeting (most slides are online --
scroll down to the "Designing Storage Architectures Meetings" section and
click through to each year's list of presentations):
[http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/meetings/index.html](http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/meetings/index.html)

The 2019 meeting just happened and had a lot of good info about current use of
tape, slides should be online in another couple weeks. (I presented there this
year and work at the Internet Archive, though we do not currently use tape in
our storage infrastructure.)

~~~
brador
> slides should be online in another couple weeks.

Why does it take so long?

~~~
hamandcheese
They have to be loaded from tape.

------
lmilcin
I think this is a bit misleading. Tape is not just the tape cartridge itself.
Quality drives are very expensive and so is tape management. Managing access
to tapes at scale is also not trivial and complicates a lot of your processes.

Another important factor everybody seems to forget is that you don't want the
tape to be your only backup. They are so slow to restore that you typically
only use tape as last resort.

For my personal backups I calculated a bunch of regular 4TB drives, external
USB 3.1 bay which takes 2 of them at once and an off-site storage (place where
I can keep drives) to be best solution.

~~~
op00to
Tape drives are consumable. LTO tape is abrasive, this cleans the heads but
also wears them down. I used to manage a scientific computing facility with a
PB scale rape archive. We ingested maybe 50 TB a day to tape, and would chew
through one of the 8 drives at least twice a week.

~~~
segfaultbuserr
> _Tape drives are consumable. LTO tape is abrasive, this cleans the heads but
> also wears them down._

Is it possible to replace the RW head on a tape drive? I guess the
manufacturers generally don't want this to be easily replaceable, so they can
sell more drives...

~~~
smueller1234
Almost universally the business model for significant deployments would be
that you have maintenance contracts anyway. That's kind of how the tape
business works, certainly if you have libraries as well. In that case you get
those drives RMA'd.

------
userbinator
IMO one of the worst parts about LTO is that it's another one of those formats
with "open" in its name, but you can't just download a PDF of the standard or
even buy it from something like ISO/IEC. There's some convoluted licensing
process involved. Only the first generation was actually open, but I guess
they decided to close it after that:

[https://www.ecma-
international.org/publications/standards/Ec...](https://www.ecma-
international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-319.htm)

~~~
bt848
What would you do with a totally open specification?

~~~
nitrogen
It's easier to recover corrupted media if you know everything about the
underlying format and protocols. As an example, I was able to recover a
partition that was partially overwritten by just a few sectors by finding a
backup copy of the superblock and writing it into the correct place armed only
with hexdump and dd. That would have been impossible without detailed info
about ext2/3/4 available.

Also look at the floppy imagers people have made, that operate at the magnetic
flux level.

~~~
Annatar
"That would have been impossible without detailed info about ext2/3/4
available."

Try telling that to IKARI+TALENT, Legend, Skid Row, PaRaDoX and all the other
cracking groups from Commodore64, Amiga, ATARI ST, PlayStations, Nintendos,
groups which competed on who is going to one-file a program or convert a
secret disk coding format to a regular filesystem, with all the protections
disabled and the programs bug and NTSC+PAL fixed while they were at it...

~~~
pjc50
"Easier". Yes, you could reverse engineer all that information yourself. It
just takes ages.

~~~
Annatar
They competed on both quality and speed, as in who will be the first to 0-day
the program which had to work 100%. Whoever got the 100% crack first won,
anybody else's crack would get nuked. Them's the rules.

So, either we have gross incompetence across the entire information technology
industry in general if it's impossible or slow, or the people disassembling
custom filesystems and protections, bug fixing binaries and adding custom
speed-loaders in record time are from another planet. Which one is it?

~~~
pjc50
This is like asserting that because Usain Bolt exists nobody needs to drive a
car.

~~~
Annatar
I've no idea who Usain Bolt is (or what it is, if it is a thing), so no clue
what you are attempting to tell me with that allegory. No rows returned from
the database. To me, it looks like

"cats are furry. Your argument is invalid."

Now, is "Hacker News" supposed to be where the information technology elite
gathers, or is that a gross misnomer these days?

~~~
taejo
I don't think it's grossly unfair to assume people know the name of the
fastest human being in the world.

It's also fine _not_ to know, but your comment assumes we know who or what,
for example, "allegory", "database", "cats" and "misnomer" are. My point is
that every discussion assumes some knowledge, and if you lack it you can just
look it up, or ask, without making allegories about cats and databases and
huffing and puffing about information technology elites.

~~~
Annatar
Is this a site for IT elite or isn't it?

------
hoseja
Cookie consent, adblock warning, autoplaying video, some kind of newsettler
form that I just glanced at before closing the tab.

What a miserable website.

~~~
aspyct
Got JavaScript disabled (thanks firefox and noscript), and I have none of that
bullshit.

Give it a try :)

~~~
moviuro
Even just the "Reader" view of Firefox fixes that:
[https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-reader-view-
clu...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-reader-view-clutter-free-
web-pages)

------
segfaultbuserr
I'm well-aware that tape is still the king for datacenter-level storage, and
I'd love to have a tape drive for my ever-increasing size of my personal
backup.

Their advantages to me is obvious: its inexpensive price and great longterm
reliability beats any alternative choices: hard drives, optical drives, or
solid-state drives, and _sometimes_ cloud. Also, it's cool to put my "tape
archive" (.tar) files on a real tape! But I found for personal uses, tapes
aren't cost-effective, the entry-cost and initial investment of the tape drive
is extremely high, it's all enterprise-grade SCSI or SAN. Unless you already
have tens of terabytes of data (video studio?), buying a tape drive is
unjustified. HDDs are still sometimes the only cost-effective choice for
personal use.

Now I mainly use HDDs for large backups (> 300 GiB), multiple Blu-ray disks
for medium-size backups (< 100 GiB), and use cloud for the smallest archives.
I don't know if Amazon's "mail your drive to the cloud" service is available
at my location, but it's also an attractive solution.

I'd like to hear about your experience.

~~~
Moru
Did you try backblaze.com yet?

~~~
segfaultbuserr
I think any cloud solution is limited by the broadband uplink. It takes 24
hours to upload "only" 200 GiB of data over a 20 Mbps uplink. It's fine for
longterm backup that literally nobody touches unless the computer breaks, but
one still has to be patient enough to backup a RAID array...

~~~
throw0101a
Backblaze has a service where they ship you a disk pack, you back up to the
unit, and then ship it back:

* [https://www.backblaze.com/b2/solutions/datatransfer/fireball...](https://www.backblaze.com/b2/solutions/datatransfer/fireball.html)

~~~
seized
Note that's for B2, their S3 like service that is paid for per GB. It doesn't
apply to their unlimited tier they are more known for.

------
jaytaylor
I'd be curious to hear from any folks who actually run tape drive setups for
personal use.

Where did you get the gear?

How cost-effective is the overall setup compared to spinning rust?

How is driver support in popular operating systems?

Is there more you'd recommend taking into consideration or learning before
jumping in? Especially beyond the obvious realities of extremely high latency,
of course ;)

~~~
TwoNineFive
> Where did you get the gear?

I have an old Quantum DLT S4 drive and something like 18 tapes. Each tape is
800GB uncompressed and I get about 1.8x compression on average. It's an
external unit connected via SCSI ultra 320. The ultra 320 SCSI card is
something I picked up from ebay for like $20. The drive and tapes I got from a
former consulting client who was going to trash it.

It was the last of the DLT line and is similar to LTO4. Get an LTO5 if
possible; it has some cool features like partitions.

I only store my most critical stuff on tapes. Each weekend I do a tape swap
and take the old tape to work on Monday and bring the oldest one back. I keep
the tapes at work in case my house burns down or something (I lived through
two house fires as a kid so I'm super neurotic about it, don't ask). The tapes
are encrypted so nobody can recover from them if they get one. If my house did
burn down I'd have to somehow procure another tape drive, but that would be
the least of my problems.

I just use a custom tar script to do it. I tried both Bacula and Amanda in the
past but they were too complicated or had other issues. My own tar script did
what I wanted.

> How cost-effective is the overall setup compared to spinning rust?

Since I got most of it for free and I already had experience with tape, it was
pretty good. I've had it since 2008 so it's over ten years old and still
going. I also have some UBS3 backup disks that I use for daily backups. In all
this time, only one tape has died and I do a full validation of the previous
backups every time I bring a tape back and re-use it.

For new installs, go with some USB3 disks from Seagate or WD -- both are
great, I have both. Avoid Toshiba due to some weaknesses in handling bumps and
vibration during runtime due to firmware (Toshiba internal drives are great
though) -- Don't ask me how I know this. Seal them into some kind of fire-
proof/flood-proof safe and store somewhere that a fire/flood won't destroy it.

> How is driver support in popular operating systems?

I'm all linux. It works. All that matters is the SCSI card being supported.
Make sure NOT to get a RAID card, regular SCSI only. The RAID cards often
won't work with tape drives because the firmware is made for RAID drives, not
tape.

> Is there more you'd recommend taking into consideration or learning before
> jumping in? Especially beyond the obvious realities of extremely high
> latency, of course ;)

So the only real advantage for me using tapes is that I got most of it for
free, the tapes are more portable and lighter than a USB hard drive for
carrying around. Almost everything else is a negative compared to USB hard
drives.

I use some UBS3 hard drives for daily backups via an rsync --link-dest script
that de-duplicates everything and that works great. For $100 you can get a
4-6GB USB hard drive from WD or Seagate and for my important stuff, that works
fine.

I'm about to fill up my older 5GB drive -- it's down to about 200GB free space
left. I already have a new 6TB drive I brought recently and when it gets down
a little lower, I'll just replace it, do full backups, and put the old drive
into storage for permanent archival.

Data backups is a full occupational specialty, like being a DBA, network
engineer, security, or web monkey. I did TSM for awhile. There's a ton of
issues in the hardware, strategy, security, performance, and more.

Do yourself a favor and just set up something simple that JUST WORKS and don't
fuck with it too much.

Do a practice recovery once and that'll teach you how good your setup is and
improve.

~~~
sshagent
As a backup specialist that last line of yours is everyone should pay
attention to. It sets expectations on recovery time and proves it work.

We ( work ) have a massive pile of DLT, mainly S4's...these were written 2005
to 2009 ish and they still restore just great. I mean, i wish they wouldn't as
i'd love to be shot of them but they are too reliable.

~~~
TwoNineFive
I think it's printed on some TSM manual somewhere and I never forgot it:
"Backups are irrelevant. Only the ability to restore matters." I had that in
mind when I said what I did.

The casual observer won't understand the difference between "ability to
restore" and "doing backups", but it matters when the building burns down.

------
sliken
Beware of two things with tape. They often have a VERY low storage
temperature. I lost $5k in tapes with a minor AC problem and the room only got
up to 115F for a bit.

Also keep in mind that capacity and bandwidth often assume 2.5x compression of
pure text, which doesn't seem like a common scenario.

The article compares SSDs to tape is silly, access times are in the minutes
when a robot is involved, and many minutes of you are swapping trays. Why
compare to SSDs with that can to 50k IOPs and up?

------
abalone
Did anyone ever figure out what Amazon Glacier uses? They only publicly talk
about using custom software to "optimize the sequence of inputs and
outputs"...[1]

[1]
[https://aws.amazon.com/glacier/faqs/](https://aws.amazon.com/glacier/faqs/)

~~~
cobookman
Note cloud vendors get the benefit of mixing high IOPs workloads with low IOPs
workloads.

Say a cloud vendor needs a bunch of HDD for a database workload with high
IOPs. Using modern disks (4+ TiB) this leaves a lot of stranded disk storage
that can only be used for low IOPs workloads.

Archive storage uniquely meets the criteria of lots of storage, yet low IOPs.

Disclaimer work for Google but have no knowledge of how AWS glacier works.

~~~
ggm
I could believe that we have a lot of unused space which is amenable to a
different overlay use, but the potential for mis-design is huge here. If I pay
high IOPs cost and you have to replace my high IOPS data backend on my
paypoint, migrating the low paypoint secondary customer is non-trivial if not
designed in day one (I am sure you did: cheap players might not understand the
risk exposure here)

The telco equivalent was ISDN, where a single linecard with two sub-rate ports
might be sold to a bank, and a domestic user. The bank could (and would)
demand card reset 24/7 to restore service to their ATM, the domestic user
simply lost carrier, and game state.

------
unnouinceput
For me there is only one factor that matters in backup. Not restore/backup
speed, not price per byte, not fashion - only reliability. Does the backup
medium will perform without corruption when times come to read it? That's the
only thing that matters.

I had this problem - store and forget, long time, as in decades. Tried a lot
of stuff and: Personal conclusion - offline backup sucks, regardless of
medium. Tape, harddisks, zip drives - demagnetization of medium. CD, bluray -
scratch and you're done. Thumb stick, SSD, non-volatile memory in general -
needs a plug-in once in a while. So what I use is encrypted volumes and upload
to cloud...and a dedicated SSD that I have on me at all times if I need
offline access (which gets plugged in daily).

~~~
Erlich_Bachman
How are you gonna scratch your optical discs? Do you move them around all the
time? Also with something like Rar recovery records or or other redundancy
measures, a scratch does not mean that you are "done", because the data can be
recovered anyway (with storage size penalty, but setting aside 10% of storage
for being able to recover from random scratches is well worth it).

~~~
masklinn
> How are you gonna scratch your optical discs?

IME the problem of optical discs is that unless they're molded (ROM) they
degrade over time.

~~~
Erlich_Bachman
Not M-Disc which is rated to last for 1000 years and can be burned with
consumer grade burner.

~~~
masklinn
That's just the company's claims.

When the Laboratoire National de Métrologie et d’Essais performed an extreme
conditions accelerated aging test (90°C and 85% RH) they found the M-Disc to
be no better than most quality DVD+R (<250h), with MPO's Gold and Northern
Star's DataTresorDisc reaching 250h (but not 500) and Syylex's GlassMasterDisc
surviving almost unscathed to 1000h.

Sadly it looks like Syylex is as dead as Millenniata, Inc (though it looks
like Verbatim still sells m-discs).

~~~
Erlich_Bachman
To be objective you should have mentioned that US Department of Defence did a
similar test and they did end up claiming that M-discs lasted for longer than
regular discs.

It looks like someone took over the production of M-Disc (wiki: "The debt
holders subsequently started a new company, Yours.co, to sell M-DISCs and
related services."), not sure about Syylex. Syylex seems like the perfect
solution (making discs in glass, the material that is routinely used in
chemical labs due to it's inertness), but the problem always was that it
cannot be burned at home...

------
robjan
Another crucial importance is bytes per square centimetre. When archiving
something, there's no point in archiving hundreds of storage controllers with
it especially if you need to store them in a safe (which you probably should).
MicroSD cards may beat tape but they are a lot slower and harder to label.

~~~
koolba
Which one wins on long term storage durability, shock proof, and water damage?

~~~
rodgerd
LTO turns out to be garbage on the key measure of "can I read my backups a
little while down the road", because you'd be surprised how quickly a new LTO
drive can't read old tapes.

It's unpleasant having to buy old drives to keep with your tape archives
because you won't otherwise be able to read them any more.

~~~
liability
Can't you just keep the old drives you wrote the old tapes with?

~~~
rodgerd
Until they break. Then you can't get a new one.

Source: have done this at scale, have spent time scouring the second-hand
market to cobble together early-generation LTO drives.

~~~
liability
Always buy two I guess. That messes with the affordability calculus though.

~~~
protomyth
You should have at least two to have critical redundancy. Not to mention
making backup testing easier.

------
marrickvillain
Disappointing article. Sure $/GB is a factor. But what about RPO and RTO? Or
$/IOPS? When those factors are taken into consideration, disk often wins.
Which is why the backup to disk market has gone bonkers in recent years and
tape hasn't.

------
raws
In terms of longevity MDisc is king (1k years estimate). How does tape compare
to drives and ssds without power? and what kind of environment is required?
Someone mentioned losing 5k$ worth of tapes to temperature hike.

~~~
Youden
MDisc is not king. Their DVDs were outperformed by competitors in a test done
by the French National Archives [0].

Further, DVDs are effectively obsolete these days and MDisc's Blu-Rays have no
scientific studies backing their claims to longevity compared to competitors
like the DVDs did. One of their largest advantages relative to DVDs is
completely gone in Blu-Rays as well: The inorganic dyes and recording layer
(these are now standard for essentially all BD-Rs).

[0]: [https://www.lne.fr/sites/default/files/inline-
files/syylex-g...](https://www.lne.fr/sites/default/files/inline-files/syylex-
glass-dvd-accelerated-aging-report.pdf) and full test and results in French:
[https://francearchives.fr/file/de7f8ea96ceb4ce38eb6d9278b3df...](https://francearchives.fr/file/de7f8ea96ceb4ce38eb6d9278b3df49260752449/static_2140.pdf)

------
FrozenVoid
Every week without fail i see articles shilling tape storage. Do people
realize only really Big Data benefits from tape? Unless you write multiple
petabytes of data that you rarely need each day, tape is inferior in every way
to hard disks. A huge corporation that counts every cent and needs lots of
cold storage might benefit from tape, and companies still prefer better
storage ( [https://engineering.fb.com/core-data/under-the-hood-
facebook...](https://engineering.fb.com/core-data/under-the-hood-facebook-s-
cold-storage-system/) ).

"Good enough for Google, good enough for you"(a lie that neglects economies of
scale that force Google to use tape).
[https://www.overlandstorage.com/blog/?p=323](https://www.overlandstorage.com/blog/?p=323)

~~~
adrian_b
No, tapes become preferable to HDDs at less than 100 TB written, not at
multiple petabytes. For many applications and for many people, including for
myself in my home, it makes absolutely no sense to use HDDs for anything, but
only SSDs & tapes. For long term storage tape is superior in every way to
HDDs, while for fast access SSDs are superior in every way to HDDs.

Obviously, because the drives are extremely expensive, whoever needs no more
than 20 or 30 TB of storage cannot afford tapes and must use a few HDDs. The
best storage technology changes in time. 20 years ago I was using optical
disks and 10 years ago I was using HDDs, but since I went back to tapes, like
I was previously using 30 years ago, I have saved a lot of money and I have
much less worries about the HDDs becoming defective.

~~~
FrozenVoid
How does it compare with 8TB USB3 drives(140$)?
[https://pcpartpicker.com/product/YpJtt6/western-digital-
elem...](https://pcpartpicker.com/product/YpJtt6/western-digital-elements-8tb-
external-hard-drive-wdbwlg0080hbk-nesn)

~~~
adrian_b
LTO-7 tapes are $10 per TB at Amazon (of course uncompressed), so they are
still cheaper, but this $17.50 USD per TB is indeed the cheapest HDD that I
have ever seen.

Nevertheless, these HDDs are much more expensive than they look at the first
glance. The real cost of archival storage is given by the price per TB and per
warranty year, because after the warranty time you must replace the storage
medium.

I have seen countless HDDs that have died just a few months after their
warranty time expired.

So these drives with 2-year warranty cost $8.75 per TB and per year.

The warranty time of the tapes is 30 years, but in fact you must replace them
much faster because you will no longer find tape drives able to read them.

For LTO tapes, you should expect to replace them after 6 to 10 years.

Even with only a 6 year lifetime, the price for tape would be $1.67 per TB per
year, i.e. more than 5 times cheaper than those WD HDDs.

If you want to just have some backups against accidents, which you expect to
erase after a few weeks, then those HDDs could be a good choice.

For archival purposes they are still much more expensive than tapes.

------
NohatCoder
Note that the article is straight up lying about the price of HDD capacity,
12TB drives generally cost more per TB than lower capacity drives, the best
capacity deals are generally in the range 3 to 8 TB. Comparing cheapest to
cheapest, tapes only go for around half the price of hard disks.

~~~
mxfh
Dunno, if shucking is an option, external consumer WD drives are regularily
available under EUR 200 for 10 TB, while bulk drives of same capacity or
higher for dedicated storage use are at least 50% more expensive. In my
experience this is a releatively new development, that those two markets
diverged that much. 2015 and before bulk HDD where usually cheaper than
external ones.

If you do care about warranty you can just keep them in the external usb
casing and enjoy having an abundance of power supplies and USB 3 cables.

If it's 24/7 hot storage it also uses 50kWH per Year at 6W. That's also about
15EUR/Year minimum energy costs per drive.

Me feeling is, that all HDD manufacterers are extracting as as much value from
the market as they get away with (meaning having more of a smell of informal
price fixing, then of free market) while they still can, before they will be
made osolete to solid state storage in 5 years latest.

~~~
NohatCoder
If we compare them to tapes, it doesn't seem fair that the hard disks should
be kept spinning, booting them up on demand still gives you vastly lower
latency than tapes.

Me feeling is that the competition in the tape market is also a bit rusty,
$3000 for a fancier VCR, what a steal! ;-)

------
mrfusion
What about tape gives it superior compression? Why can’t that same compression
be applied to any storage?

~~~
jarfil
Nothing. They estimate an average compression based on an average dataset with
uncompressed text data. That wouldn't work for things like already compressed
video, audio, encrypted data, and so on.

~~~
cl0ckt0wer
works great on giant uncompressed database backups though

~~~
sliken
Sure, or just datadump | gzip > /dev/tape or similar. Tape loves to brag about
bandwidth/capacity and then hide the assumed 2.5x compression in a footnote.

~~~
namibj
Please consider zstd instead. It is superior in every way except memory usage
and compatibility with old systems.

~~~
nightfly
pigz!

~~~
terrelln
Zstd also has a multithreaded mode. On the CLI `zstd -T0` tells zstd to use
all available cores.

~~~
namibj
Please be aware that this will significantly impact compression ratio. So much
actually, that I don't dare use it by default. I'd often use the non-
multithreaded mode as for some data (perf.data files with large stack
captures, most recently) and reasonable compression speeds of >=50MB/s input
multi-threaded modes are not pareto-optimal.

I'll get a small benchmark script for that done over lunch. Come back here
later.

~~~
Cyan4973
> Please be aware that this will significantly impact compression ratio.

Is this a continuation from previous message ? Because multithreading mode of
zstd doesn't impact its compression ratio. It's actually an interesting
property of zstd : whatever the nb of threads used, the compression ratio
remains the same (aka. reproducible).

------
Dylan16807
> you can buy cheap LTO-7, reformat them to M8 and get 9TB of native storage

Note: You can't _re_ format them this way. This is a permanent choice you make
with a blank tape.

~~~
mmaunder
Also IIRC you cant do this yourself with a regular LTO7 tape and drive. I
think you need some kind of drive shuttle or you need to buy the tapes
preformatted by someone who has the right gear. I have an LTO7/8 drive and I
cant do this.

------
scraft
We had a Ditto drive and a series of tapes, bought circa 1996. We used the
software it came with on Windows to perform full back ups of the machine,
cycling between a set of tapes (maybe 6). Backup would complete overnight.
Never had to restore from it. It was a consumer friendly, easy to use product
and cheap. My father was an accountant that ran his own practise, so needed to
know his files were safe. That went from carbon copies into a second filing
cabinet, to 5 1/4" floppies for groups of clients, to 3.5" floppies, to Ditto
tapes to USB sticks to Microsoft Cloud storage (which sinks between laptop and
PC). The oldest days of filing cabinets and floppies were easy, the middle
days of Ditto and USB storage was more worrying, and the final days of cloud
storage went back to being simple again. Now he is retired so none of it
matters.

This was all donkeys years ago, so it is interesting to hear how things have
changed.

------
stelonix
Are there any cheap tape drives? If not, what's the issue? Is it the fact the
prices are kept high because it's used mostly by business/enterprises
customers? If so, are there any hopes of LTO becoming mainstream for home
desktop usage? Couldn't find much info on Google about this.

~~~
NeedMoreTea
DAT (Well DDS) used to fill that niche. Used to be pretty reasonably priced -
for tape. Went for a few hundred a drive, an order of magnitude less than LTO.
Smaller capacity each generation though, but is an older standard.

Disappeared for no apparent reason about a decade or so ago.

------
vonseel
As someone totally unfamiliar with tape aside from knowing some places still
use it for archival and recording audio to tape - something totally different
- is incredibly expensive and most (if not all?) recording tape is out of
production, I’m surprised storage tape is still a thing.

How does storage tape even work? Is this literal tape in a cartridge much like
tape in a cassette tape? I assume we’re not talking about data stored in 1s
and 0s? Is this technically an analog medium!?

Going to do some googling now to quell my curiosity.

The article does seem targeted at consumers. I’m going to guess I’d need some
expensive hardware to even use one of these $60 tape drives.

------
basicplus2
"As for transfer speeds, they can reach 300MBps"

I am getting over 500MBps on my setup

~~~
jaytaylor
Impressive.

Will you share more information about the specific details (i.e. hardware and
configuration) for the set up you're running with?

~~~
merb
well probably with compression

~~~
jolmg
I wonder if the 300MBps figure might also be with compression.

~~~
adrian_b
No, the LTO-7 transfer speed is 3 Gb/s a.k.a. 300 MB/s without compression.
The compression in drive may be useful for automated backups, but if you use
the tape for an archive of files selected by yourself, it is better to disable
the drive compression. If you have compressible files, you can compress them
with better algorithms on the computer, before storing them on the tape.

~~~
merb
> you can compress them with better algorithms on the computer

is that always true? what if I have dozen's of pdf's which are similar and
compressed (most pdfs are)? wouldn't de-duplication also reduce the size? I
mean with millions/billions/trillions of files of the same format.

~~~
adrian_b
For example on a computer you can use algorithms like lrzip, which search for
very long distance redundancies (i.e. not in small data windows like
traditional algorithms). This usually achieves a decent compression even on
normally incompressible files, e.g. on collections of movies or on collections
of PDF files, because it may find repetitions at least e.g. in the headers of
the files or of the file sections. If there are similar files, then there are
chances that lrzip will find repetitions between files, even if a traditional
compression would not find repetitions inside a single file. If de-duplication
is possible, then that would also be much more efficient than enabling the
compression option of the tape drive.

------
hyperpallium
If you overshoot demand on one performance metric, buyers shift to another as
yet unsatisfied criterion.

e.g. 8" HDDs are also cheaper per byte than 5.25", than 3.5", than SSD's.

------
vadansky
Is Tape worth it for a movie collection? I don’t think I will see any benefits
of the compression and the prices seem comparable to just buying a 8TB HD

~~~
adrian_b
Tape (LTO-7) costs 3 times less than the cheapest HDDs, so the prices are not
comparable at all.

To recover the drive + SAS HBA card costs, the movie collection must be larger
than about 75 TB if you store double copies or larger than about 50 TB if you
store triple copies.

If you store a single copy of any digital medium, the chances to not lose
anything after many years are negligible.

~~~
magicalhippo
Here the LTO-7 is only half as cheap as a HDD, ~110 USD for 6TB tape vs ~230
USD for 8TB HDD (cheaper per GB than 6TB models).

Cheapest new LTO-7 drive is over 3000 USD though, which means you'd need more
than 300TB of data for a new LTO-7 tape solution to be cheaper here.

~~~
adrian_b
110 USD is extremely expensive. In Europe, at Amazon, the price is 60 EUR,
including sale taxes, for a 6 TB tape from IBM, Quantum, HP or Fuji.

Looking at Amazon USA (just search LTO-7), I see prices between USD 63 and USD
69, or even just $60 per cartridge if you buy a 10-pack. That is still more
expensive than where I buy, but it is nevertheless far closer to 3 times less
than HDDs than to 2 times less than HDDs.

~~~
magicalhippo
Could be there are cheaper ones, and this was single pack, maybe the 20 pack
is cheaper still.

Though again, with the cost of the drive you need quite a lot of data for it
to make sense.

------
jolmg
> Even if LTO-8 tapes are now in stock, you can buy cheap LTO-7,

I wonder if this was a typo. Did they mean that LTO-8 tapes are out of stock?
Otherwise, the sentence structure "even if ... are now in stock, you can buy
..." is kind of weird.

> reformat them to M8 and get 9TB of native storage (22.5TB compressed).

What does this mean? Doesn't how much it compresses depend on the data not the
storage device?

~~~
bengerbil
There was a dispute involving LTO-8 that just recently was resolved, so LTO-8
tape should now be available in the US. I wasn't following it closely, so I
can't give any real insight, but it explains the wording.

~~~
mycall
3TB for $153. Not impressed.

[https://www.google.com/shopping/product/10502190238469223139](https://www.google.com/shopping/product/10502190238469223139)

~~~
jolmg
That says 30TB.

Here's a 15TB compressed for $63:

[https://www.amazon.com/HP-C7977A-Cartridge-Compressed-
Capaci...](https://www.amazon.com/HP-C7977A-Cartridge-Compressed-
Capacity/dp/B01NCB4ZZP/ref=mp_s_a_1_10?keywords=lto7+tape&qid=1569376299&s=gateway&sprefix=lto&sr=8-10)

~~~
tw04
The tapes and robots are cheap. Drives on the other hand...

~~~
jolmg
Yeah, they all seem to be between $2,000 and $3,000, and I can't imagine how
these things could be much more complicated than a dvd drive, if they aren't
simpler.

~~~
dbuder
Open a DVD player then open a VHS player, the dvd does more complicated things
on a tech level but VHS player is harder and more expensive to make. Early gen
drives are cheap on the second hand market, you can pick up a crummy one for
under $100, tape usually included.

------
jammygit
I was told once that certain types of storage medium will demagnetize over
time and that you need to spin them up to prevent data loss

------
Mave83
If you only save your data as a single copy on a single tape, then the price
is quite low (around 1/3 of Glacier). However you can reach prices of below
Glacier using online storage with GB/s performance and access times of
milliseconds using Ceph with the right hardware selection including every
cost. You can learn more about how from croit.io.

------
not_a_cop75
And why wouldn't it? Tapes as far as I know cost pennies to manufacture. It's
easily over 90% plastic in most cases. The low quality ingredient on a low end
tape is probably still ferric oxide - not exactly an expensive chemical if I
know anything about chemistry. Perhaps cobalt is still heavily used as part of
the coating as well.

------
techntoke
Price per byte maybe, but in value you are sacrificing a lot. I prefer
continuous backups and versioned storage.

~~~
viraptor
You're not sacrificing anything. Or specifically having a long term, offline
tape storage does not prevent you from having short term, online, versioned
file/block storage. Different use cases.

~~~
techntoke
Well, my online versioned storage via Google is unlimited for $12/mo which
syncs my files locally and then I have another backup provider that does the
same thing via CrashPlan Small Business which is also unlimited for $10/mo. So
that is $22/mo for unlimited continuous backup and versioning. I don''t see
how tapes would offer much value, and storage location of those tapes
especially for a home use case is likely going to be a single point of
failure.

~~~
viraptor
Ok, but how fast can you restore if something fails? And how fast can you add
200gb of new data to that service? It's not for home use, but they're are
valid use cases.

~~~
techntoke
As fast as a local CrashPlan backup can restore based on the storage medium.

------
stiray
The tape story is really killing me. I even bought one old tandberg for 200
euros, used and run it on an ancient hardware just for backups. I just dont
get it that in all those years not a one single vendor decided to make less
expensive tape devices for the consumer market.

~~~
EvanAnderson
There used to be less expensive consumer-oriented tape drives (floppy-based
QIC, various parallel port drives, VXA, an DDS/DAT). That segment of the
market has been subsumed by backup services, USB-based solid state or hard
disk-based storage, and writable optical media.

------
learnstats2
"But there's something else that tape offers that no other storage medium
currently offers and that's on-the-fly, transparent compression which can go
up to 2.5:1"

I don't understand this point. Why would tape allow compression that other
forms of media don't?

~~~
tenebrisalietum
Lots of tape drives offer built-in compression. The drive firmware does it. On
AIT3 drives you can enable or disable it.

Compression may have been a big deal in the ages of sub-1Ghz single core
systems but not anymore. Especially since you ought to be encrypting before
writing anyway.

Why does it continue? Probably so they can double the capacity that they put
on the tape label, which is always the compressed capacity and not the native
or real capacity. Plus backward compatible with such encoded tapes.

------
cf141q5325
Does anyone have any experience with encrypted tapes and could give a few
words about their setup? Mainly other options then the manufacturers
encryption.

~~~
adrian_b
I do not trust any kind of encryption inside devices, because I cannot verify
how the keys are managed. The essence of encryption is that the key must not
be stored together with the encrypted data, but if a key is ever used inside a
device you cannot be sure that it can no longer be retrieved from it in the
future.

The data files that I am writing to the tapes have their metadata written into
a database to be able to retrieve them in the future, then I group them in
chunks of an approximately fixed size (50 GB in my case), then I compress
them, then I encrypt them and then I add some redundancy (with par2) for error
recovery. A simple solution for compression with encryption is the lrzip
program, but for more flexibility in encryption you could use e.g. the openssl
program invoked with the desired parameters. There are many encryption
programs and any of them is better than using the encryption option of a tape
drive.

So I queue the files to be written on the tape in a directory and when the
size of the directory exceeds a threshold (50 GB in my case) a script is
invoked that does the processing mentioned above, including the encryption,
then it writes the result on the tape. A similar script does the inverse
operations when I retrieve a file or group of files from the tape, giving its
position as a tape number + a tape file number as obtained from the file
database.

~~~
cf141q5325
Thank you for the detailed answer.

------
ryanmercer
It never ceases to amaze me how much tape I still see imported, mind you I see
way more SSDs, then HDDs but still a fantastical amount of tape.

------
idlerboris
It's crucially important to take managing and lifetime of such storages into
account. I doubt it can fight with SSD or HDD.

------
jart
If you want to talk about MBps, imagine a truck full of tape cassettes driving
from the Google data center to off-site storage.

~~~
perl4ever
From the sound of your comment, you haven't heard of this:

[https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/](https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/)

...putting stuff on a big truck is a very viable alternative to using a series
of tubes.

------
meshr
This is not true at least in my experience. Price doesn’t tell you about
reliability. I have 10% of broken cartridges and 66% of broken tape drives.
These devices have mechanical parts and are sensitive to magnetic fields so
they could be damaged easily. If you don't believe me then I can send you all
this garbage to you

------
bufferoverflow
That's if you don't count the extra time required to deal with tape backups.

------
ai_ja_nai
Assuming that you already own the tape recorder, WTF

------
craig1f
This is the principle behind AWS Glacier

------
mister_hn
sure, but they are really slow. It depends on your use cases.

~~~
adrian_b
Tapes are slow only at the latency of random access. Their sequential transfer
speed is lower than that of good SSDs, but higher than that of HDDs.

------
ijiiijji1
I worked at IT for a large university. We had an HP/Compaq SSL2020 with dual
AIT drives made by Sony. The issue was never determined (perhaps micro debris
in the air), but the drives has to be replaced nine (9) times due to failure.
Furthermore, backup and verification is a tedious process, and combined with
local and offsite vaulting and tape management, having proper backups is a
royal PITA but there's no substitute. Replication isn't a backup because it
propagates errors and you can't do disaster recovery without proper software,
offsite vaulting and practice.

 _Backups aren 't valid until they're tested._

