The challenge of keeping data safe and accessible will probably never truly end. It seems that every medium has some major caveats when it comes to cold storage, but if you spend some time researching the problem, one format keeps coming up: tape.
This might sound weird given that the tape media we know, like cassettes or VHS, are pretty fragile and prone to degrading, but if we're talking about Linear Tape-Open (LTO) you're looking at a (ideal) lifespan up to 30 years, and a cost per terabyte that's significantly cheaper than SSDs or hard drives. So why isn't everyone on the LTO train?
The dream of near-limitless storage cheap storage
Everyone loves a cheap byte
Vatchara Katpakong/Shutterstock.com
The latest LTO-10 generation of tape can store up to 40TB natively, and up to 100TB with compression. This is the latest generation of LTO, so it's still relatively expensive per tape. You're looking at around $500 per tape, which works out to roughly $5 a terabyte if you get the full benefit of compression. Even just looking at native capacity, you're looking at $12.50 per TB.
Compare that to something like a $900 Seagate IronWolf Pro enterprise hard drive at about $28 per TB, and you can see the allure for archival purposes.Tape is still the backbone of the cloud
You've probably used it without knowing
Bacho/Shutterstock.com
You might be surprised to know that we are into the 10th generation of advanced enterprise tape storage. It feels like it should be obsolete, making us think of ZX Spectrum cassettes and reel-to-reel mainframe data storage, but the truth is that tape storage is still an important part of the storage mix in data centers.
Big data centers use tape storage for data that's accessed infrequently, and to make safe offline backups that are immune to hackers and malware. Far from being obsolete or old-fashioned, it's crucial.
The drive cost kills the dream instantly
Talk about sticker shock!
While the tapes are relatively cheap on a per-terabyte basis, the actual tape drives are incredibly expensive. The previous generation of tape drives cost well over five grand and if you have to ask what the latest drive generation costs, you probably can't afford it. For a data center, this hardware cost is negligible, because the volumes of data they need to store on tape quickly make the costs minuscule compared to hard drives and SSDs.
For a homelabber or someone looking for a long-term backup solution at home, well, it's not in most people's budgets! That said, if you go back to the 5th or 6th generation, we're starting to look at hundreds instead of thousands of dollars per drive. Though, of course, the tape capacities plummet too, and you have to deal with the SAS connection standard, which isn't meant for consumer computer technology.
Since you can buy a stack of large enterprise hard drives for the same money, the math just doesn't work out yet for home users.
Tape changes how storage actually works
It's a paradigm shift
Even if you got one of these LTO drives for home use, they don't work quite the same way as other forms of storage. As a linear tape, you're going to have long seek times and no random access to speak of. These drives offer good sequential read and write speeds, but you wouldn't want to, for example, use one as a Plex drive . To store old movies that you've already watched but don't want to lose? That's a good use case, but for live access? You want a hard drive instead. While modern tapes can be mounted in a way that looks like a file system to a computer, the underlying hardware just isn't suited to being accessed like the other storage we're used to using.
As durable and long-lasting LTO cassettes are, they do wear out relatively quickly from reading and writing too. Even the latest generation only has an end-to-end "full pass" rating of a few hundred cycles. Also, if they're going to be in cold storage for more than a month, you have to start looking at climate-controlled storage.
It only makes sense for a narrow use case (for now)
Tape excels in one very specific scenario: write once, read rarely. If you're archiving footage, backing up massive datasets, or storing data you might not touch for years, it's almost perfect.
For everything else, it falls apart. Everyday storage needs convenience, speed, and simplicity. These are areas where even cheap hard drives easily win. However, as home hosting and local data storage becomes more popular, there might be an incentive to create a version of this technology that doesn't cost thousands of dollars, where the drives don't have to stand up to data center levels of wear-and-tear. I don't know if it will happen, but we can hope!
