Magnetic tape drives have long occupied the role that hard drives have shifted toward since the emergence of SSDs – cost-effective cold storage. Although they’re too slow for most users, recent developments allow magnetic drives to carry hundreds of gigabytes per square inch of tape. This week, IBM’s offerings in the space took another step forward.
The company’s new TS1170 drive can store 50TB of uncompressed data per tape cartridge using the new JF media type. Employing 3:1 compression expands the capacity to 150TB. The technology represents a 250 percent increase over the TS1160 drive and JE media, which reached 20TB uncompressed and 60TB compressed. Additionally, the TS1170 manages a native data rate of 400 MB/s, increasing to 900 MB/s when handling compressed data.
I’ve toyed with the idea of getting a used tape drive so I can use it to back up data – but mostly just to play with the technology. They’re not that expensive on eBay, but there’s quite a few different types and offerings, and it’s difficult to get a grasp on what would be a good option for a tinkerer to go for.
I’m fairly sure I know the answer, but how would a tape drive like this work as part of a HTPC? For something like Kodi via LibreELEC or something like it?
It wouldn’t. Drives are stupid expensive, tapes will be too until adoption is significant.
Tapes are also horrendously slow. You’d spend minutes seeking tape looking for the requested data. Imagine recording a box set of Pingu to a 4hr VHS and then seeking to a specific episode. Except it’s automated and high quality. It’s still going to be dog slow.
A home NAS is much more affordable and practical.
The123king,
Right! It could be compelling for backup if it were affordable. That’s always been the main selling point for tapes since fast online access isn’t supper important. If disks are significantly cheaper though, tapes are a hard sell even when random access speed isn’t important.
Getting a few generations older ones seem to be preferred in the “home lab” community. But even then, the pricing only make sense if you have huge amounts of data.
Let’s say you have a 100 TB home NAS.
Option 1: optical discs
(Will not even calculate this, they are obsolete except for archival)
Option 2: HDDs
You can get 14TB WD Easystore external drives for $200 a piece, and then “shuck” the internal drive to use in a backup set. You’d need 8 of them for a total cost of = $1,600.
Option 2: LTO 6 tapes.
You can get 20 of them for about $280 on eBay (2.5TB uncompressed x 20 = 50TB). You’d need two sets, making the cost $560.
Much cheaper than the HDD option… only if you already have a LTO6 drive.
A drive goes for $500+ on eBay (used, with other accessories like storage PCIe cards to make it work).
Overall cost then goes to $1,060, still cheaper than HDDs, but not by such a margin that you’d decide to switch to a new unknown (to you) ecosystem.
Anything less than 50TB?
HDD wins.
Cold storage is a role that HDDs are particularly poor at though. Sure, they’re cheap, and high capacity, but they have moving parts that fail, and suffer from stiction (where read heads can weld themselves to the platter). Sure, they’re quite well suited for always-online archives, where data is needed sometimes but not often, but i am certain that hard drives aren’t anywhere near suitable for long term archiving.
The123king,
I’ve had old tapes drives lock up too. But at least you can buy new drives to access old media. Regardless of disk or tape, IMHO good practice is to always have more than one copy. With raid, hot spares, and software to automatically perform periodic integrity checks, it should be possible to mitigate the disk failure concerns. That obviously increases the price and complexity of things, but still actively monitored storage (ie every couple of weeks) can provide more confidence than media sitting in a closet for years / decades.