leptons 9 days ago

Still twice as expensive per TB as the LTO 5 tapes I'm getting on ebay.

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  • shiroiushi 9 days ago

    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.

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    • leptons 9 days ago

      >Hard drives don't require an ultra-expensive tape drive to use

      I bought an LTO 5 tape drive for $150. Do you really think that's "ultra expensive"? I do not. In fact I purchased 3 more LTO 5 drives for another $150 (I got lucky on that deal). These are all used datacenter hardware, tons of them on eBay now. The price is really not what you might be thinking it is.

      > plus a computer somehow capable of actually holding and connecting to that drive

      I have lots of computers, my backup computer is an old server of mine which is still very capable. It's just an old i5 computer, gaming motherboard, 16GB RAM but it can sustain 140MB/s write speed to the tapes. Good luck getting that sustained write speed on a refurb hard drive.

      >they have SAS interfaces, so you need a computer with a SAS HBA just to install the thing

      Yes, it cost me a total of $30, again from eBay. Not too expensive at all. I have purchased about 6 SAS cards from eBay for various computers (I have 3 RAID10 setups), none have failed, all have been very reliable, and they are all very inexpensive and easy to install.

      > and you only find those on server-grade hardware.

      You find them all over eBay for cheap. I installed these SAS cards in "gaming" motherboards. No, you do not need specialized "server-grade hardware" to install them into.

      >You're not going to plug one of these things into your laptop.

      Duh, laptops are for portability. If all you have is one single laptop you probably aren't doing anything serious anyway, and likely have no need for massive amounts of storage. I have desktops, servers, and laptops, and I use them all appropriately.

      >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.

      That's great, but it's still 2x more expensive per TB to hoard hundreds of TB of data. And hard drives do not have a write-protect notch, so as soon as you connect any hard drive to a compromised computer (whether you know it's compromised or not) you compromise the backup too.

      Tapes were made for off-line long-term storage, hard drives were not. I have plenty of hard drives, but I know what they are for and I use them appropriately. I also know what tapes are for, and my life as a datahoarder has been far better (and more affordable) since I got the tape drives.

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