Comment by stego-tech
7 months ago
I mean, this reads as I expected it to: SSDs as cold storage are a risky gamble, and the longer the drive sits unpowered (and the more use it sees over its life), the less reliable it becomes.
Man, I’d (figuratively) kill for a startup to build a prosumer-friendly LTO drive. I don’t have anywhere near the hardware expertise myself, but I’d gladly plunk down the dosh for a drive if they weren’t thousands of dollars. Prosumers and enthusiasts deserve shelf-stable backup solutions at affordable rates.
I agree with the general sentiment, but just a headsup for those who might be unaware...
> thousands of dollars
I know this varies a lot based on location, but if you're stateside, you can get perfectly functional used LTO6 drives for $200-$500 that support 6TB RW cartridges that you can still buy new for quite cheap (20pk of 6TB RW LTO6 carts[0] for $60), much cheaper than any other storage medium I'm aware of and still reasonably dense and capacious still by modern standards. Sure it's 3-4 generations behind the latest LTO's, and you might need to get yourself a SAS HBA/AIC to plug it in to a consumer system (those are quite cheap as well, don't need to get a full RAID controller), but all in that's still quite an affordable and approachable cold storage solution for prosumers. Is there a reason this wouldn't work for you? Granted, the autoloader/enclosed library units are still expensive as all hell, even the hold ones, and I'd recommend sticking to quantum over IBM/HPE for the drives given how restrictive the later can be over firmware/software, but just wanted to put it out there that you don't necessarily need to spend 4 figures to get a perfectly functional tape solution with many many TB's worth of storage.
0: https://buy.hpe.com/us/en/storage/storage-media/tape-media/l...
LTO6 capacity is 2.5TB. 6TB is "compressed" which these days is near worthless because data collections that size are likely to already compressed (example: video).
If the idea is to back up a hard drive, it's not nice to require big piles of tape to do it. Right now even the current LTO generation (LTO9, 18TB native capacity) can't back up the current highest capacity hard drives (28TB or more, not sure). In fact HDD is currently cheaper per TB (20GB drive at $229 at Newegg) than LTO6 tape ($30 for 2.5TB) even if the tape drive is free.
LTO would be interesting for regular users if the current generation drive cost $1000 or less new with warranty rather than as crap from ebay. It's too much of an enterprise thing now.
Also I wonder what is up with LTO tape density. IBM 3592 drives currently have capacity up to 50TB per tape in a cartridge the same size as an LTO cartridge, so they are a couple generations ahead of LTO. Of course that stuff is even more ridiculously expensive.
Unless I misunderstood something, the comment you replied to has a link to HPE selling packs of 20 new LTO-6 cartridges (2.5TB x 20 = 50TB) for $60 (i.e. $3 per 2.5TB cartridge) which is far cheaper than a hard drive.
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Correct, and absolutely worth noting, but point still stands. Had no intention of misleading, I called it a 6TB drive because that's what they're called (technically 6.25TB if we really want to get pedantic). Whether using LTO's compression or not, whether your data is already compressed or not, it's still a reasonable affordable, dense, reliable, approachable cold storage offering. Same is true even for LTO5.
It only starts to go sideways when you step up to LTO7 and above or try to get an autoloading all-in-one library unit. Though you can get lucky if you're patient/persistent in your bargain hunting.
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