Tape Drives

Are tape Drives actually used, or are they just a boomer meme?

Attached: hp-storeever-lto-4-ultrium-1760-scsi-internal-tape-drive-500x500.jpg (500x500, 26K)

Other urls found in this thread:

backblaze.com/blog/lto-versus-cloud-storage/
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open#Generations
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Attached_SCSI#Connectors)
twitter.com/NSFWRedditImage

they still get used in legacy systems, like really old healthcare and government records

I worked at a kmart 2 years ago that did tape backups every night.

so there the boomer of optical drives?

Quints confirms tape is the way to go for backups.

absolutely based

god dammit, looks like im getting a tape drive now.

nice digits user

Nice get

Attached: 1541868176076.png (281x282, 39K)

In enterprise? I'd say obligatory, cheapest price per TB. For instance around 20$ for 1,5 TB storage (up to 3TB with compression)
They are so popular, that many IT services would perform daily backup of servers and store it on that medium.
That also requires automation tools which would "juggle" with changing the tapes.

In home usage? The cost of newer generation of LTO drives are quite expensive though and require SAS controller.

Witnessed. Very good get.

The Tape God has spoken. Repent.

Where I work we found some old tapes with some manufacturing data on them from the early 90s. Don't know if we still have the drives lying around to read them or not. Possibly got rid of them at some point. Then again we might. One of the computers used for temperature compensation and calibration of one of the products we sell still runs Windows 98 so you know... not out of the realm of possibility.

For your home anime server? fuck no, but for storing backups of actually important shit, which needs to be updated every so often, heck fucking yes, you can get so much fucking data into those it's silly, particularly useful for weekly backups at the place where I work, shoving our DB there has saved our ass more than once.

My company abandoned all their tape drives. They weren't worth the effort it took to recover data.

Do you guys use anything other than lto?

Tape drives... fucking tape drives...

I was arrested in 2011 the cops recorded to tape still

Recovering data from tape sucks dicks though.

thats a different kind of tape lol

I wish I could find a place to buy such a drive for cheap.

Some police divisions use Panasonic Arbitrator recorders, that use SD card or can connect to a laptop to record to disk.

I don't know where I qualify in the boomer/zoomer/etc, I was born in 93 but I use magnetic tape storage for scraping data and saving old shit that I wont use much anymore. Realistically paying 50$ for 15TB of auto AES 256 encryption 300MB/sec IO speed is not bad at all.

Try ebay

They are used for archival data storage. Nothing beats tape in terms of longevity, data density and media cost for archival data storage. M-Disc comes close.

The library of Congress uses tape drives to this day for super cheap storage.

Full recovery isn't so bad. It is partial recover that sucks.

Boomer trash that can be destroyed by moisture, UV, Magnets.

Use HDD clusters with ZFS.
NVME SSD cache.
Don't use hardware raid either just sata expansion controllers.

Tape is trash since you can only use tar on their filesystem.
Shitty bit rot algo.

>just buy something even more wasteful and expensive goy
wonder who's behind this post

>just forget about data rot, drive parity, speed, hotswapping, automatic resilvering and buy into a proprietary locked down specification where you can only afford the decade old models because it's so fucking expensive for a drive goy

Attached: Sprungbobi-squarepatzen.png (377x355, 202K)

>data rot
buzzword
>drive parity, speed, hotswapping, automatic resilvering
why the fuck do you need these in a backup system
>proprietary locked down specification
you literally don't know what these mean

>don't buy that $700 drive, spend $5,000 on an autistic NAS that eats 10x more space and 20x more power goy, support my buddies in tech and big oil too!

does rotational velocidensity affect tape drives

pls respond

>buzzword
Real thing that happens when writing from RAM idiot
>why the fuck do you need these in a backup system
Because when your tapes die while restoring idiot. drive parity covers the hardware layer and checksumming covers the software layer.
Hotswapping is so you can put a spare drive in the zpool and it will auto restore leaving you no hassle.
You can just take out the dead drive and load in another spare when you get free time.
Also speed is very important for reading data and with ZFS with caching it's probably 50%> the speed on the low end.
>you literally don't know what these mean
Correction YOU don't know what that means.
>Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM, and Quantum control the LTO Consortium, which directs development and manages licensing and certification of media and mechanism manufacturers.

When I see 3rd party chinker drives that costs

Yup, at work we use tapes for weekly backups. They get stored onsite for a year then after they're sent to an offsite location for 3 years before they get reused. We have a NAS for daily backups, which is what the tape drives copy off of.

Absolutely nothing comes close

In some ways your post is retarded and completely wrong in other ways somewhat correct. Almost no companies with any IT budget, or some ancient shit they are too cheap to replace still use tape. But several cloud storage, and cloud backup solutions use tape as they super cold storage. As in it has sat in cold for years and they don't even tell the user it is now on tape. You just have like a 2 day sla.

>x4 1TB HDDs
A 3TB RAID-5 array is not worth discussing in a thread about tape. If your data requirements are that miniscule, of course tape is not economical. Tape makes sense when you have 100TB+.

Tapes are for archival patterns. ZFS is for the live/production environments not archives.

>Being this retard on not knowing the proper tools to use for your storage needs

Implying that HDDs aren't susceptible to toward items and more.

Long-term digital storage media is a massive engineering problem. Tapes and M-Disc are the best options in town.

>idiot
>idiot
>idiot
>obviously doesn't even understand the use case he's complaining about
typical /hsg/ fucktard, take your buzzwords back there

So are m disc blu rays the only cheap non tape solution that isnt hard drives?

Regular (not m-disc) blu-rays also satisfy your stated criteria.

And they’re like double the GB for the cost. Yeah they don’t last “a 1,000 years” but I can’t imagine much data you’d need to last that long, so buying en masse for cold storage is dumb. 15 years is plenty for the average archiver. Well unless they’re autistic enough to want to leave their Great x15 grand child some 300 year old media on a depreciated format, in which case go for it.

today i started working on program and device that would allow me to store data on old audio casettes and it seems more complicated than it seemed at the begining

LTO4? Also, drive, or library? I want to build a ZFS array but since spinning rust is so expensive, it seems like tape is gonna be my only option for backing up that sheer amount of data. Also, what do you use for a host connection? SCSI, FibreChannel? I don't mind sticking cards in my server if I have to.

t. data-hoarding zoomer

I see the following offers in auctions.
- Cheap-ass LTO2 drive on SCSI ranging from 50 to 200PLN ( up to 53 dollars)
- LTO3 begins from 170 to 350 PLN (92 dollars)
- LTO4 raning from 600 - 700 PLN (183.95)
- LTO5 on SAS one offer for 1400PLN / 372 dollars.

From what I see LTO3 is relatively cheap to toy with and 800GB capacity is good enough for me.

How so? If you are trying to pull up a long string of content it'll fly at 500mb/s+ on older LTO-5.

They are far more durable than hdds/sdds and have way more storage.
It is highly likely that a lot of archiving sites or digital libraries use them

backblaze.com/blog/lto-versus-cloud-storage/

For an end-user it's very hard to make it break even. I ended up shucking 8x 8tb external drives

While everyone seems to have a opinion on tape vs hdd, but does anyone have any information on popular LTO drives/options that are viable today?

Ebay - HP LTO5 drive: ~300$
Amazon - 10x IBM LTO5 Tape: $205

Tape - 15tb of uncompressed space
Shucked $150 WD 8tb - $505/$150 = ~3 == 24tb+

Doesn't seem to be the greatest deal, also considering it's a one tape at a time drive.

all hail the omnissiah for his blessing of quints

Using LTO-7 to backup my data.
Once you invested in a current iteration, upgrading to a new iteration isn't that expensive anymore, because resale price is still considerably high.
No more data loss!!!

This is true. Tapes need a massive infrastructure and investment, and they go bad, so you need redundance and cycle-read them all every few months to replace the bad ones. Very bad idea unless you are a big corp with tape magazines and the whole shebang.

I switched my company to exactly that: cheap HDDs on sata controllers on cheap PCs. ZFS scrubbing whenever I want, and I know all data is good all the time. Tapes without a huge budget is stoopid.

don't worry user he's an idiot who has never seen a real tape drive installation.

>spinning rust is so expensive
considering tapes, because he looked only at the price of the tapes. Lol retard.

>redundance cycle read them every few month
Not really.

Say maybe only once in a year, but you can never let yourself forget about them, which as an individual you will do and suffer the consequences, or as an enterprise you'll have to budget for that shit forever. Like has been said, tape investment pays off upwards of hundreds of TBs. Service contracts for hardware and software, temperature controlled storage, off-site storage, super fast I/O to keep those LTO8 magazines happy. We are soon at LTO9. Thinking you can buy a LTO5/6/7 and make it work? lol they are all so beaten up that they spit out only read errors no matter how they are configured.

Also, you could service a DAT tape with a screwdriver. Good luck fixing mysterious failures, or random overheating, or firmware errors on a LTO6 you got off ebay.

These just came today (40 tapes in total). I can already foresee the overweight sysadmins here sharting at the anus and wondering why someone would buy old 100GB LTO-1 tapes and well, they were dirt cheap and cost less than a second hand 4TB drive so thought why not. I need a format that I can archive on and forget about, it's good enough for what I need.

Attached: IMG_1166.jpg (1280x960, 121K)

no (you). ZFS is nice, since the array can be checked whilst online and almost all errors corrected without needing to down the whole array. much better than EXT4. but still, that doesn't mean *I* won't fuck something while experimenting. 32TB+ is a lot to lose and building *another* 32TB+ array isn't really economically viable, hence, research into cheap/used tape hardware

i bought my LTO-7 as new when it came out and i am updating to LTO-9 soon.
I also have an old LTO-3 recorder here and some bands i haven't touched for years.
About three month ago, i put all that content on my LTO-7 bands and got zero errors while reading.
The LTO-3 bads were recorded like 6 or 7 years ago and never touched ever since.

I don't buy worn down company shit. And DAT is way too sensible with all their rubber transport rolls and shit.
LTO uses bakelite rolls and metal parts for the mechanism.
I guess my old LTO-3 recorder will still make his job in 20 years from now.

Cool

>LTO-3 recorder here and some bands
LTO3 is small today. "Some" is 10 tapes? less? Maybe you got lucky. The density of those LTO3 tapes is also small to have many errors compared to today's generations. A normal LTO tape is rated at 200-300 passes. They are meant to be used once, and stored. Overwriting them just 10 times without I/O on your PC that can sustain 3-400 MB/s will get the drive rewinding the tape like mad and is going to create errors in a short time.

True the mechanical reliability of drives is very good, but tape is an expensive game and it only gets more expensive at every generation. It's the tapes themselves that will be eaten up by the drive if you can't feed it LTO7 or LTO9 speeds. With a normal PC that is almost unachievable.

LTO-3 bands: 32 tapes in total.
LTO-7 bands: 82 tapes in total.

they are used because of regulatory compliance; when you have to keep records for so many years
they are still pretty cheap

Fu, what kind of disorder have you in your filesystem when you keep files offline for 7 years, then decide to move them online again? also, what are you storing in 80 lto7? are you hoarding blu-ray rips? Very much doubt you are generating any significant amount of that yourself. Uncompressed video is the only thing that can generate big amounts of data but artsy types don't know what a tape is.

I have one of Europes biggest music backups and also do backup all the Netflix, Hulu and Amazon prime content.
New releases get sent to me twice every week, which i then have to backup.

You don't happen to have the 50M myspace tracks lying around then?

i guess not, but i get sent all CD's that get released in Europe to back them up.

my home anime server is quite important thank you very much

Only CDs?

Pay attention, shills. This is how you do viral marketing on Jow Forums.

>have budget
>decide how to spend it on Jow Forums

sugoi monogatari onee-chan

They are used for enterprise/3 letter agency tier archival and backup purposes.

This thread needs more pictures of tape drives.

Attached: DSC_0335.jpg (3264x2448, 1.72M)

Please respond.

bump

We have a HP-UX test machine in work that backs up to tape. I am the only one that knows anything about it, Everyone else thinks it magic and complains that it does not have windows on it

1 Gig tape drive on your printer port.

Attached: 1Gig tape.jpg (4032x3024, 2.08M)

>Parallel port
Imagine the restore time.

With those things time wasn't the issue.
Just getting the data off after the tape had stretched after a rewind was.

Google buys 60% of the world's tape

My main problem with tape drives is that all the old ones you can get for cheap can only use a fucking SCSI interface

Attached: 1511018104992.jpg (480x480, 14K)

Witnessed, the Tape God has spoken.
Based backups.

God damn it. I didn't even want a tape drive. They better be cheap.

Bitrot isn't a meme you fucking dingus

Lots of companies don't have high speed internet access (ftth or fttc) so they can't put anything more than a couple of gigs online during the night.
We have as a client the biggest screws factory in Italy and their backups (~50VM) reach 5TB with optimized compression with Veeam. Online storage isn't available because they are on adsl (even a wireless bridge is difficult in their area) so they use NASes (plural?) and tapes. Lots of them. They even store some in a banking building refrigerated in another city

Yes, sometimes also DAT tapes.
Both are masters usually with 48Khz samplerate.

The movie industry sends me either tapes or master BluRays.

Sup niggas

Attached: _IMG_000000_000000.jpg (891x1809, 161K)

tapedubs

I just realized that PCI-E SCSI card costs as much as LTO-3 drive. What gives?

low volume manufacturing adds a ton to the cost of things

>think I'll get a tape drive for fun because of this thread
>it'll be like a cd drive that I can screw around with and is probably really cheap nowadays
>they're all fucking $2000 or more
>mfw

Attached: tape.png (1048x602, 96K)

No one is aiming for brand new. 2nd hand is where the price drops significantly.
Look for anything between higher or equal to LTO-3.

I don't understand any of the tech buzzwords in the listings, there's too many and I don't know the specifics enough to know what I'm looking for. could you point me towards something specifically I can buy to start messing around with tapes?

- LTO - linear tape-open. It is a technology using tapes to store data. Strictly for archiving purposes.
- There is a couple of technologies using tapes, but LTO is by far the most successful.
>numbers at LTO
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open#Generations

The biggest issue with generation is simply cost. LTO-3 are cheap af.

>internal / external
- Internal is aimed to insert into 5.25 bay. It can either utilize 1 or 2 slots. With newer generations there is no performance difference.
- External will utilize extra power plug. Thus your PCI-E card from PC better have external slot too.

>SAS
Older generations are using SCSI port, newer are using SAS (see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Attached_SCSI#Connectors)

shit looks like I'm buying a Colorado drive