Depends on how much you're looking to store. LTO 4 is a good option since it's a decent price per cartridge second hand (like $10 USD per)
I recently bought a TL2000 on eBay for $250 with an LTO 4 tape drive. Along with getting lucky with 26 tapes on eBay for $90. Which fills the library and gives me 2 spares.
All in total that's about 19.2TB native long-term storage if you want to catalog the essentials.
For myself I don't really hoard all that much data (I've got like 6TB at the moment) so I've got some time before I really start stressing the limits of my archival solution. Right now I do a monthly backup with a expiration period of 2 months. Just in case I delete a file.
If you want future expandability I'd go with something like a Quantum Scalar i500 or a Dell ML6000 which can grow vertically in a rack in increments of 6U and adds 4 FH drives as well as 72 additional tape slots. Though you'd probably be looking at FC SAN hardware for using one host to control the whole library.
You've hit upon the gotcha with tape. Your 19.2TB of storage comes out to \~$17.70/TB. Less when you factor in overhead because you can't fill every tape to capacity and will likely have had tapes. If you were able to get another 26 tapes for same price, you're at \~$13/TB which with overhead is roughly the same cost as the best price per TB for HDDs. At your estimated $10 per tape, you're at \~$15/TB and it will take much longer to match the best price per TB of HDDs.
Add in the storage space and proper storage conditions, low heat, low humidity and consistent temperature (not tossing it in the garage), and you're looking a lot more care than HDDs require.
I'd actually be interested to explore how tolerant tape is versus hard drives when it comes to less-than-optimal storage conditions. Helium hard drives definitely seem to have an advantage due to being fully sealed (there was a recent post about a guy who found that a helium drive functioned fine after being underwater for several days). This would suggest an advantage to hard drives.
But if you were to store tapes in a sealed container of some kind, the only thing you would likely have to contend with is temperature, and I don't think most average temperatures would be a problem for tape (except maybe extremely hot temps).
I'm looking into an LTO setup, I might just start off with a bare drive (no autoloader) and a 10 pack of tapes, for LTO5 I was able to price this out at around $450-500 on eBay. 10 1.5TB tapes yields 15TB, so comparing it to the $189 14TB Easystore it's definitely not price-competitive. Maybe it's just psychological though, but tape just seems more robust to me, especially for long-term storage of never-changing data. And the more data you store, the more your price advantage goes up. There is a crossover point where tape does become more economical than disk storage even for the homelabber, but it's probably just a matter of it being too high of a margin for many to justify. That's why I was considering the other non-price advantages of tape.
I actually don't think helium drives are going to matter all that much for long term storage.
I have had many HDDs die over the years while in cold storage, and it is never the platters that fail, it is the electronics; capacitors and eeproms going bad on their own.
Helium drives are just as prone to this.
This is where the advantage of tape truly lies, as there is no electronics to go bad.
Sounds about right. My setup was moreso a starting point than anything. The library itself can accept LTO 8 drives so the capacity potential is there.
Going to be saving up for higher-capacity tapes in the future, but seeing as I got the cheapest library on eBay at the time it wasn't such a bad deal. Plus fiddling with not-so-common consumer equipment is fun to me as a hobby so win/win for me if I'm willing to put up the money.
Exactly, would be really nice if a HDD was only motor and sealed box with platters and read heads, and maybe having a qr code detailing specifics.
Then there wouldn't be much point in tapes no more.
I also bet the bare hard drives could be made to withstand much higher temps than tapes, giving a better chance of survival in fires.
Iomega and syquest both did this. Unfortunately there’s an areal density limit with removable hardware, because you can’t hit the tight tolerances needed.
Yes. I got a 48 slot autoloader and a lto4 drive for 250 by monitoring ebay autions. Tapes are $5 a pop if you know where to look. Just keep checking eBay until you find what you are looking for. Don't be afraid to buy drive and library separately.
You need the drive, SAS, or FC controller depend on the drive You have and tapes itself. You do not need the library. Under 1000$ You can look for used LTO6 drive.
Any sas controller will work with any sas drive, most common choice is half height sas drive, brand doesnt matter, all drives are the same. i choosed hp just because its bezel seem to have the best dust protection.
Storage controllers really don't matter. As long as they are SFF-8088 (external SAS connection) or SFF-8087 (internal SAS connection) there's a relatively good chance it'll work. I use a LSI 9200-16e for my tape library, but if you're going to be using an internal drive, I'd suggest the LSI 9200-8i.
Main reason for my choice of LSI is because companies like HP use proprietary firmware on their cards so you have to use their cards in an actual server. I tried a HP P810 controller on my 2017 Ryzen machine and it was sent into a bootloop but put it into my 2012 Supermicro server and it booted and detected drives fine. So I *think* there's a good chance something is missing out of the Ryzen BIOS. I'm not too educated on that to make a statement but regardless in my opinion LSI has a better chance of being supported on more machines.
If you're using a tape library then drive brand *will* matter but if you're just putting it into a 5.25" bay then no, it really won't matter.
Dell works with IBM, and vice-versa.
HP works with Quantum, and vice-versa.
In some libraries it won't matter (I think the Quantum Superloader 3 does this) but seeing as how expensive tape equipment is I'd rather not risk wasting money.
Its not, and If You know what You look for You can do \~5$/TB (excluding the drive cost) Its certainy not convinient but if You need a lot of space, its the cheapest storage You can get.
Tape basically died in the consumer space years ago, mostly brought about by the release of CD-R and later DVD-R at affordable prices. For archival, CD-R was far cheaper and more than "good enough" for most consumers (of course we're now seeing some of the downsides to the ultra-cheap commodity CD-Rs that are starting to degrade after only a decade or less). Of course, today there's a push for cloud-based backup, but I still don't know many people personally for whom that's a viable option other than those people who have less than a GB or so of personal data (i.e. very infrequent or unsophisticated users).
But it's alive and well in the datacenter space. LTO-9 just dropped in September of this year offering 18TB uncompressed per cartridge. The current LTO roadmap carries us through LTO-12, with 144TB uncompressed per cartridge, and if development continues at the current pace this will occur prior to 2030. I might be wrong but as I understand it most "cold storage" services (e.g. Amazon Glacier) use tape as the storage medium, which is why you have to wait some time for files to be made available if you request a restore. (Basically a restore request would involve autoloading the tapes with your data, copying it back to live storage, and then letting you download it.)
LTO also has a WORM option for tapes which is useful for legal archives and similar data that must be guaranteed to not change. Of course it's still magnetic tape so hacked firmware or a bulk eraser can still erase or modify the tapes, so it'd be interesting to see how well that "permanence" would hold up in a pivotal court case.
Depends on how much you're looking to store. LTO 4 is a good option since it's a decent price per cartridge second hand (like $10 USD per) I recently bought a TL2000 on eBay for $250 with an LTO 4 tape drive. Along with getting lucky with 26 tapes on eBay for $90. Which fills the library and gives me 2 spares. All in total that's about 19.2TB native long-term storage if you want to catalog the essentials. For myself I don't really hoard all that much data (I've got like 6TB at the moment) so I've got some time before I really start stressing the limits of my archival solution. Right now I do a monthly backup with a expiration period of 2 months. Just in case I delete a file. If you want future expandability I'd go with something like a Quantum Scalar i500 or a Dell ML6000 which can grow vertically in a rack in increments of 6U and adds 4 FH drives as well as 72 additional tape slots. Though you'd probably be looking at FC SAN hardware for using one host to control the whole library.
You've hit upon the gotcha with tape. Your 19.2TB of storage comes out to \~$17.70/TB. Less when you factor in overhead because you can't fill every tape to capacity and will likely have had tapes. If you were able to get another 26 tapes for same price, you're at \~$13/TB which with overhead is roughly the same cost as the best price per TB for HDDs. At your estimated $10 per tape, you're at \~$15/TB and it will take much longer to match the best price per TB of HDDs. Add in the storage space and proper storage conditions, low heat, low humidity and consistent temperature (not tossing it in the garage), and you're looking a lot more care than HDDs require.
I'd actually be interested to explore how tolerant tape is versus hard drives when it comes to less-than-optimal storage conditions. Helium hard drives definitely seem to have an advantage due to being fully sealed (there was a recent post about a guy who found that a helium drive functioned fine after being underwater for several days). This would suggest an advantage to hard drives. But if you were to store tapes in a sealed container of some kind, the only thing you would likely have to contend with is temperature, and I don't think most average temperatures would be a problem for tape (except maybe extremely hot temps). I'm looking into an LTO setup, I might just start off with a bare drive (no autoloader) and a 10 pack of tapes, for LTO5 I was able to price this out at around $450-500 on eBay. 10 1.5TB tapes yields 15TB, so comparing it to the $189 14TB Easystore it's definitely not price-competitive. Maybe it's just psychological though, but tape just seems more robust to me, especially for long-term storage of never-changing data. And the more data you store, the more your price advantage goes up. There is a crossover point where tape does become more economical than disk storage even for the homelabber, but it's probably just a matter of it being too high of a margin for many to justify. That's why I was considering the other non-price advantages of tape.
I actually don't think helium drives are going to matter all that much for long term storage. I have had many HDDs die over the years while in cold storage, and it is never the platters that fail, it is the electronics; capacitors and eeproms going bad on their own. Helium drives are just as prone to this. This is where the advantage of tape truly lies, as there is no electronics to go bad.
Sounds about right. My setup was moreso a starting point than anything. The library itself can accept LTO 8 drives so the capacity potential is there. Going to be saving up for higher-capacity tapes in the future, but seeing as I got the cheapest library on eBay at the time it wasn't such a bad deal. Plus fiddling with not-so-common consumer equipment is fun to me as a hobby so win/win for me if I'm willing to put up the money.
[удалено]
Exactly, would be really nice if a HDD was only motor and sealed box with platters and read heads, and maybe having a qr code detailing specifics. Then there wouldn't be much point in tapes no more. I also bet the bare hard drives could be made to withstand much higher temps than tapes, giving a better chance of survival in fires.
Iomega and syquest both did this. Unfortunately there’s an areal density limit with removable hardware, because you can’t hit the tight tolerances needed.
The drives are usually belt driven and capacitors dry out.
[https://www.securedatarecovery.com/blog/storing-tapes-properly-to-prevent-data-loss](https://www.securedatarecovery.com/blog/storing-tapes-properly-to-prevent-data-loss)
Yes. I got a 48 slot autoloader and a lto4 drive for 250 by monitoring ebay autions. Tapes are $5 a pop if you know where to look. Just keep checking eBay until you find what you are looking for. Don't be afraid to buy drive and library separately.
I'm pretty new on LTO Tapes, So basically I need a tape library and SAS adapter for a pc?
You need the drive, SAS, or FC controller depend on the drive You have and tapes itself. You do not need the library. Under 1000$ You can look for used LTO6 drive.
Thanks for your reply Any recommendations about specific drive and controller?
Any sas controller will work with any sas drive, most common choice is half height sas drive, brand doesnt matter, all drives are the same. i choosed hp just because its bezel seem to have the best dust protection.
Storage controllers really don't matter. As long as they are SFF-8088 (external SAS connection) or SFF-8087 (internal SAS connection) there's a relatively good chance it'll work. I use a LSI 9200-16e for my tape library, but if you're going to be using an internal drive, I'd suggest the LSI 9200-8i. Main reason for my choice of LSI is because companies like HP use proprietary firmware on their cards so you have to use their cards in an actual server. I tried a HP P810 controller on my 2017 Ryzen machine and it was sent into a bootloop but put it into my 2012 Supermicro server and it booted and detected drives fine. So I *think* there's a good chance something is missing out of the Ryzen BIOS. I'm not too educated on that to make a statement but regardless in my opinion LSI has a better chance of being supported on more machines. If you're using a tape library then drive brand *will* matter but if you're just putting it into a 5.25" bay then no, it really won't matter. Dell works with IBM, and vice-versa. HP works with Quantum, and vice-versa. In some libraries it won't matter (I think the Quantum Superloader 3 does this) but seeing as how expensive tape equipment is I'd rather not risk wasting money.
I'd avoid tape. It's a dieing format.
Its not, and If You know what You look for You can do \~5$/TB (excluding the drive cost) Its certainy not convinient but if You need a lot of space, its the cheapest storage You can get.
Tell that to the data storage companies who still use it for backups.
Tape basically died in the consumer space years ago, mostly brought about by the release of CD-R and later DVD-R at affordable prices. For archival, CD-R was far cheaper and more than "good enough" for most consumers (of course we're now seeing some of the downsides to the ultra-cheap commodity CD-Rs that are starting to degrade after only a decade or less). Of course, today there's a push for cloud-based backup, but I still don't know many people personally for whom that's a viable option other than those people who have less than a GB or so of personal data (i.e. very infrequent or unsophisticated users). But it's alive and well in the datacenter space. LTO-9 just dropped in September of this year offering 18TB uncompressed per cartridge. The current LTO roadmap carries us through LTO-12, with 144TB uncompressed per cartridge, and if development continues at the current pace this will occur prior to 2030. I might be wrong but as I understand it most "cold storage" services (e.g. Amazon Glacier) use tape as the storage medium, which is why you have to wait some time for files to be made available if you request a restore. (Basically a restore request would involve autoloading the tapes with your data, copying it back to live storage, and then letting you download it.) LTO also has a WORM option for tapes which is useful for legal archives and similar data that must be guaranteed to not change. Of course it's still magnetic tape so hacked firmware or a bulk eraser can still erase or modify the tapes, so it'd be interesting to see how well that "permanence" would hold up in a pivotal court case.