Comment by musha68k
Comment by musha68k 10 days ago
It's amazing how much cheaper spinning disks have gotten over the years. We should all be archiving more IMO.
Comment by musha68k 10 days ago
It's amazing how much cheaper spinning disks have gotten over the years. We should all be archiving more IMO.
I usually buy from ServerPartDeals and goHardDrive. I missed out on a really great refurb sale of 12TB Seagate drives that were $74.99 each, but even now, you can find 12TB disks for $89.99.
My only problem with LTO5 tapes is the amount required to do backup. Were I going to do LTO, I'd have to go with LTO9 since they hold 18/45TB and are around $90 a tape.
$74.99 for 12TB is still twice as expensive as the LTO 5 tapes I'm getting on ebay. The LTO drive was pretty cheap too, so I'm still way ahead in my 200TB archive with regards to price. The other thing I like about tape is that is has a physical write-protect notch, so if my systems were infected with some ransomware, it wouldn't be able to touch my tapes even if I have a tape in the drive. Plug a hard drive in and you could be instantly fucked by the ransomware.
I'm not sure how much write-protection would be useful in practice. If you're restoring from backups after a malware infection, you wouldn't directly restore on the infected system. You would first reinstall the OS/restore some earlier snapshot and then restore the data.
Of course tape can't be beat, always great for offline / offsite archival. I was talking about more ergonomic online archiving without including tape robots ;) Even if price per spinning TB didn't fall much since the pandemic started - IIRC I couldn't have bought a 20TB prosumer disk new for ~$300 then.
For "Hot" backup I have two mirrored RAID 10 systems (one in a detached garage, so technically "off site"), so I could lose up to 4 drives without losing any data. That's where the cheap hard drive storage comes in handy. One of those systems runs 24/7, so I pay a premium for spinning disks because availability is what that's all about. The "off site" system kind of a cold-storage backup system with the LTO tape drive in it. That system does weekly backups, and it also acts like a buffer for all the less "hot" data that mostly goes almost straight to tape until it's needed again.
I waited for years for used datacenter tape drives to become affordable. The math for DVD or hard drive cold storage didn't make sense, especially since I like redundant backups so it's 2x the cost. Tapes were designed for cold storage and it's faster and more cost effective than backing up to hard drives. Maybe I'll change my tune someday after a tape unravelling disaster if that ever happens, but in 2 years it's been pretty reliable.
>The cheapest refurb hard drives are still about $15/TB.
Huh? I just bought some 10TB refurb drives from Amazon for $60 each.
Hard drives don't require an ultra-expensive tape drive to use, plus a computer somehow capable of actually holding and connecting to that drive. From what I read, you can't even connect one of these things to a normal computer: they have SAS interfaces, so you need a computer with a SAS HBA just to install the thing, and you only find those on server-grade hardware. You're not going to plug one of these things into your laptop.
A typical SATA HDD, by contrast, can be connected to any common consumer-grade motherboard, or you can just get a USB HDD dock if you really need to.
Spinning disks are kind of expensive. I'm paying about $3.00/TB for LTO5 tape. The cheapest refurb hard drives are still about $15/TB.