I don't mean that type of archive, but rather "just in case" data like "last month's scrape of this website" after we scraped it 5 more times this month or higher resolution versions of book scans. You might want to still be able to dump it out quickly if you need it. Money is no object for these companies and the cost of HDDs is more than low enough for the flexibility they provide.
This is why I am buying a couple of LTO 6 tapes. Thus far I've been able to buy 4 for approx 120 EUR, 2,5 TB each. They have been around 30 EUR each the past years, and still are approx such price (leaning towards 35 EUR though). I bought a second hand drive for about 500 EUR, and a HBA for it.
Tapes are great for true cold storage (will easily last many decades!) but they will wear out significantly with more intense use: you only get a couple hundred passes total over their full data capacity, either read or write. In practice, you still need plenty of big hard disks to act as nearline storage for practical use, and the tape only rarely does storage and retrieval in bulk. This is also why you see mechanical tape libraries with tens or hundreds of tapes for a single read/write unit: you don't really need more than that.
I don't mean that type of archive, but rather "just in case" data like "last month's scrape of this website" after we scraped it 5 more times this month or higher resolution versions of book scans. You might want to still be able to dump it out quickly if you need it. Money is no object for these companies and the cost of HDDs is more than low enough for the flexibility they provide.
If demand for hard drives is this high then it sounds like there wouldn't be near enough tape around either.
This is why I am buying a couple of LTO 6 tapes. Thus far I've been able to buy 4 for approx 120 EUR, 2,5 TB each. They have been around 30 EUR each the past years, and still are approx such price (leaning towards 35 EUR though). I bought a second hand drive for about 500 EUR, and a HBA for it.
Tapes are great for true cold storage (will easily last many decades!) but they will wear out significantly with more intense use: you only get a couple hundred passes total over their full data capacity, either read or write. In practice, you still need plenty of big hard disks to act as nearline storage for practical use, and the tape only rarely does storage and retrieval in bulk. This is also why you see mechanical tape libraries with tens or hundreds of tapes for a single read/write unit: you don't really need more than that.
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