Latest generation LTO-10 tape arrives at Spectra Logic – Blocks and Files
Posted by NamelessVegetable@reddit | hardware | View on Reddit | 19 comments
Posted by NamelessVegetable@reddit | hardware | View on Reddit | 19 comments
Vitosi4ek@reddit
I would be excited for this, if previous-gen LTO drives were actually cheap enough for consumers now. I'd happily buy like an LTO-6 drive (a 13 year old standard) and a bunch of 4-6TB tapes to back up my media NAS, but even those start at like $2k and often require weird connections, necessitating even more hardware to actually get it working.
Like, everyone keeps saying that RAID isn't a backup, and I agree, but where in the absolute hell would I back up almost 70TB of data to? The NAS including the drives cost me around $1500 over multiple years, I'm not spending twice that just for a backup apparatus.
callanrocks@reddit
You just plug the HBA into the tape drive. Most places sell the cables and ebay has plenty of old enterprise HBAs. I think that Windows and Linux even have support as standard.
dannybates@reddit
Yeah was about to say. I have installed a few tape drives and tape libraries to IBM iseries machines. You just need 2 things. Mini-SAS for data and ethernet cable for remote management/control.
Xurbax@reddit
Most of the reasonably-priced drives (on Ebay) seem to be Fibre Channel though...
FranconianBiker@reddit
FibreChannel is plug and play on linux. I have two cheap drives (LTO-5 and 6) on a cheap FC hba in a pcie to thunderbolt dock connected to my linux notebook. Works like a charm.
dannybates@reddit
Fair enough, I don't know how much these things cost. I just get told to install them. I know they can be crazy expensive though.
hans_l@reddit
Real talk; backing up on site is not a real backup. The RAID is probably sufficient for a disk failure, but if there’s a fire those tapes aren’t gonna be much help.
There are services out there for like a few hundreds a year that will backup your terabytes off site. You just need to have the bandwidth to upload it (or ship it).
Also, I don’t know about you but I have about 4-5 TB of actual non repro data on my local network. Movies and music I can always redownload if I lose them. So for me at least I don’t need that much backup. If you really have 70TB of personal non-reproducible data then you need to consider shipping hard drives to an offsite backup provider.
Student-type@reddit
How exactly would you download your music library if you lost it? Buy each song over again? Each album? TIA
Sarin10@reddit
most people with large digital music libraries pirated the music.
hollow_bridge@reddit
singular backups are not a real backup, having an onsite backup is a critical part of any backup solution.
hollow_bridge@reddit
lto-6 has come down a lot in price, you can get uesd system running for under $500, even lto-7 is would be under $1500
ProfessionalPrincipa@reddit
Tapes are always the rote recommendation for a true backup medium by the big brained data hoarders but what they always fail to mention is that it is considered enterprise stuff with enterprise prices requiring esoteric things to get working. It's not helpful advice at all. I'll live with my disk arrays and cold HDD's.
remosito@reddit
no write/read speed bump?
the only reason I was excited for lto10..
oh well maybe they wont fuck up lto11...
Student-type@reddit
I agree with the idea of huge optical drives based on nano-ceramics for backup. Access times and throughput rates seem to be the issue for now.
However, I’m reminded that amorphous glass is slowly morphing over time, since it is flowing due to gravity. Old plate glass storefront windows are noticeably thicker along the bottom edge.
reddit_equals_censor@reddit
kind of sucks, that decently longterm storage is basically enterprise only and can't be used for real time.
would be neat if the next innovation, like writing inside of glass in 3 dimensions will get cheap enough to be used by the average customers as longterm backups and storage options even.
if the random read would be fast it could also be used as WORM storage in a standard desktop setup.
but yeah the fact, that rightnow most of the data from humans is written to spinning rust, which has a quite short lifetime and nand, which well... can't be used for longterm storage without power given to it as well, we are kind of in a very shit place here.
so yeah would be really nice if we could get sth to fix this shit.
imagine being able to have written all the pictures and videos taken by a family inside of a glass in 3d.
so that probably 1000 years or 1000s of years in the future people can still look at it.
getting "optical drives" back, but it is actual glass, that we write and read inside of it and have it be basically indestructible most things and not degrading at all at the cost of blurays and bluray writer + read drives today would be so dope to see happen, instead of this tech also being enterprise only effectively again...
a decent video about this kind of tech to get an idea:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rfEYd4NGQg
and yes microsoft is pure evil, but this video explains it nicely.
let's hope we get a future of auto checksum mirrored in a zfs type setup system drives at capacities, that are big enough, that size isn't an issue anymore (so for now 100 TB drives for cheap) and all backed up to your glass "disk?" thing.
then again the industry doesn't even wanna give the average consumer working memory with actual REQUIRED ecc function and just laughs as people lose their data due to memory corruption happening randomly, so i guess having storage solved properly is a dream of a less dystopian future for the average consumer.
BatteryPoweredFriend@reddit
The big problem with all of these "resilient" cold storage formats isn't the storage media, it's the retrieval mechanisms/machines. They're always some combination of the triangle of suck - expensive/fragile/proprietary.
Tapes are already a bit problematic because of how expensive drives are, even though carts themselves are price-competitive. But at least with them, they have pre-existing and widespread (or at least "widespread") adoption going for it.
Vitosi4ek@reddit
Exactly. Sure, M-Disc will last for hundreds of years, but the pinnacle of precision engineering that is a DVD drive almost surely won't. Or if it will, there won't be a computer with a SATA port to plug it into, nor the drivers for its OS.
If you suddenly uncover a 5.25'' floppy disk in your attic containing some digital artifact from your childhood, how exactly do you extract it in the year 2025? And that's only a ~40 year old technology.
reddit_equals_censor@reddit
good point you mentioned.
having it be a widely used technology by enterprise would VASTLY reduce this issue.
if we got voxel based writing + reading inside of glass, then the same readers + writers could be used for 100s of years at least then, if that is the best cold storage we get for a long time, which then allows hopefully for costs to come down at lower voxel density versions drives and glass wise (if the glass changes a bit over time i guess?) to make it useable by the average consumer.
so yeah in this current dystopian world we gotta have enterprise and consumer to be able to have the same tech to have it not disappear after just a short period at least.
exomachina@reddit
Most companies require the tapes just to check a box.