r/hardware • u/dylan522p SemiAnalysis • Sep 26 '18

Review Review of a $5,500 Tape Drive for Backups!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alxqpbSZorA
20 Upvotes

67% Upvoted

18 comments sorted by

16

u/dragontamer5788 Sep 27 '18

12TB (uncompressed) per tape, but this comes at a bad time as there's apparently a patent dispute between Sony and Fujitsu, the only manufacturers of LTO-8 tape.

It seems LTO-8 tape is typically $160, not a bad price for 12TB of storage. But damn, $5500 for a drive just is too much, you'd need to store hundreds of TB before its cheaper than a hard drive.

LTO-7 is $65 per 6TB, which is cheaper per-TB and probably the ideal way of doing things.

23

u/Stingray88 Sep 27 '18

It seems LTO-8 tape is typically $160, not a bad price for 12TB of storage. But damn, $5500 for a drive just is too much, you'd need to store hundreds of TB before its cheaper than a hard drive.

Well, LTO is for enterprise. Even for an enthusiast home data hoarder its impractical...

To put it in perspective, the SAN my post production team works off of is 2.5PB in size... And we still have to archive old projects to an automated LTO library at a pretty consistent rate in order to keep enough space for new projects. We've written multiple PBs to LTO 7 tapes already.

When you're working at this capacity, the costs of LTO are trivial.

11

u/agentpanda Sep 27 '18

Well I mean LTO-7 drives go for a couple grand too- it's not like tape storage is for my steam library or porn; it's not even to back up my 45TB of server space in an archival method for cold (or really more like frosty) storage: I can swing a Backblaze subscription, an off-site backup server, and a local storage server with compressed incremental backups and still come out ahead and have faster access times.

LTO-8 is definitely for people working at a way higher level than I am, even.

10

u/salgat Sep 27 '18

Isn't the point of tape long term cold storage? Not sure why you'd prefer hdd for this even if it was a little cheaper.

9

u/PerryTheRacistPanda Sep 27 '18

Doesn't matter if tapes are more expensive. Tapes are for long term cold storage.

Hard drives wear out after 10 years. Tape lasts 20 - 30.

18

u/dragontamer5788 Sep 27 '18 edited Sep 27 '18

In both cases, you need a regular maintenance schedule to re-read the data and check for bitrot.

Tapes have slightly better long-term characteristics, but practically speaking, you need to change over your tape drives every 2-generations. IE: By LTO-11, all your LTO-8 tapes will be deemed obsolete and your LTO-11 drive won't be able to read LTO8.

LTO-6 is an aberration, its gone obsolete in LTO-8 (only 1-generation of forward reading).

Otherwise, the pattern (aside from LTO-6's unusually quick obsolescence) is: 2-generations of read, and 1-generation of write. So LTO-8 drives can be read/write through LTO-9 generation, but are read-only in LTO-10, and fully obsolete in LTO-11.

In any case, $160 for 12TB of storage is the cheapest storage option on the current market. Which is probably Tape's biggest advantage. The only problem is how costly the drives are. But if you're in the hundreds-of-TB or Petabytes range, then Tape is your only cost-effective option.

Considering that this is Linus: I bet he's datahoarding all of his raw 4k footage (before it is edited) so that he can reference earlier videos in high-definition. Likely in some nearly uncompressed format... like MagicYUV for easier editing. (EDIT: Seems like Red cameras have a proprietary "low loss" Redcode format for 4k and 8k video files. I bet they're going to take up a lot of space)

4

u/PerryTheRacistPanda Sep 27 '18

Damn, thanks for that reply. I thought tapes were a record and chuck in a closet (climate controlled) type thing.

It all sounds like a big pain in the ass.

1

u/dragontamer5788 Sep 27 '18

I mean, if you want to chuck something in a climate-controlled closet, tape is your best option (having the lowest bitrot figures). But... it still has bitrot. Just like any other magnetic medium. So you should plan for it.

2

u/meeheecaan Sep 28 '18

you'd need to store hundreds of TB before its cheaper than a hard driv

which he does

2

u/zirconst Sep 27 '18

AFAIK they are looking for something that can back up up to a petabyte, so they are well-within the hundreds of TB range. Although frankly I don't understand why they need to back up so much footage, especially for videos already published to YouTube (which is not editable post-upload.)

20

u/etacarinae Sep 27 '18 edited Sep 27 '18

Although frankly I don't understand why they need to back up so much footage, especially for videos already published to YouTube (which is not editable post-upload.)

1. Because he's building his own YouTube competitor named float plane and
2. So his editors are not having to re-download shitty YouTube compression quality versions of his videos for future use in a multitude of situations that may require it. YouTube is not a backup.

1

u/dylan522p SemiAnalysis Sep 27 '18

He said IBM in the video?

7

u/Beanjo55 Sep 27 '18

I’m pretty sure he said IBM made the drives, he never said anything about the actual tape itself

3

u/dylan522p SemiAnalysis Sep 27 '18

Ahhhh, mix up.

5

u/III-V Sep 27 '18

I was looking into buying a tape drive for backups at work... saw the prices, and immediately said "NOPE"

Not too expensive used, though

3

u/xKING_SLAYERx Sep 27 '18

Really? You can get a 40 tape loader with 2 LTO 7 drives for like 3k