Haven’t hard drives been cheaper per storage amount than SSDs forever? The problem was always that they were slow. I think tape may still be cheaper per storage amount than hard drives, but the speed is abysmal.
Yes. SSDs are still excellent for small form factor and speed, but for long term reliable storage in massive volumes, old fasion hard drives are only second to tape storage.
Source: I am in charge of four 1.2PB storage clusters, each consisting of 144 10TB Toshiba drives. The systems write their output to 10TB tapes for data delivery.
And that there is the real crime. It’s a real shame no one’s making a tape drive at the consumer market price point. Tapes are a hell of a lot more convenient for backups and archival than the giant weird pile of storage formats we’ve seen over years.
Wendel from level 1 techs really likes the multi actuator spinning rust drives. You still wouldn’t use them for a boot drive, but they’re fast enough to saturate a sata connection, while still being much more dense than ssds. They can achieve 500MB/s sequential speeds, so they’re plenty fast for large file access. Most consumers should be using SSD’s but if you’re dealing with more than a couple terabytes, the best solution isn’t as straightforward.
There’s some space occupied by the servo tracks (which align the heads to the tap) in LTO, but if we ignore that…
Current-generation LTO9 has 1035m of 12.65mm wide tape, for 18TB of storage. That’s approximately 13.1m², or just under 1.4TB/m².
A 90 minute audio cassette has around 90m of 6.4mm wide tape, or 0.576m². At the same density it could potentially hold 825GB.
DDS (which was data tape in a similar form factor) achieved 160GB in 2009, although there’s a lot more tape in one of those cartridges (153m).
Honestly, you’d be better off using the LTO. Because they’re single-reel cartridges (the 2nd is inside the drive), they can pack a lot more tape into the same volume.
Haven’t hard drives been cheaper per storage amount than SSDs forever? The problem was always that they were slow. I think tape may still be cheaper per storage amount than hard drives, but the speed is abysmal.
Edit: yeah looks like tape is 3x to 4x cheaper than hard drives https://corodata.com/tape-backups-still-used-today
Yes. SSDs are still excellent for small form factor and speed, but for long term reliable storage in massive volumes, old fasion hard drives are only second to tape storage.
Source: I am in charge of four 1.2PB storage clusters, each consisting of 144 10TB Toshiba drives. The systems write their output to 10TB tapes for data delivery.
Tapes themselves are cheaper but there’s also the upfront cost of the tape drive (we’re talking thousands).
And that there is the real crime. It’s a real shame no one’s making a tape drive at the consumer market price point. Tapes are a hell of a lot more convenient for backups and archival than the giant weird pile of storage formats we’ve seen over years.
Wendel from level 1 techs really likes the multi actuator spinning rust drives. You still wouldn’t use them for a boot drive, but they’re fast enough to saturate a sata connection, while still being much more dense than ssds. They can achieve 500MB/s sequential speeds, so they’re plenty fast for large file access. Most consumers should be using SSD’s but if you’re dealing with more than a couple terabytes, the best solution isn’t as straightforward.
I’d love to see what could be done with current tape storage technology in standard compact cassette format.
There’s some space occupied by the servo tracks (which align the heads to the tap) in LTO, but if we ignore that…
Current-generation LTO9 has 1035m of 12.65mm wide tape, for 18TB of storage. That’s approximately 13.1m², or just under 1.4TB/m².
A 90 minute audio cassette has around 90m of 6.4mm wide tape, or 0.576m². At the same density it could potentially hold 825GB.
DDS (which was data tape in a similar form factor) achieved 160GB in 2009, although there’s a lot more tape in one of those cartridges (153m).
Honestly, you’d be better off using the LTO. Because they’re single-reel cartridges (the 2nd is inside the drive), they can pack a lot more tape into the same volume.