The nice thing about LTO as a format is its relative predictability and ease of acquiring the parts, even the very obsolete ones. It's all SCSI or SAS, most of the interesting stuff happens at the hardware level, with a bog-standard API. Your average backup app, whether it be Backup Exec or mtx/tar/etc. on Linux doesn't need to care about the media format. Unlike actual "enterprise" shops with datacenters and support contracts and such cruft, where the primary concern is "does it work", it is fine to buy older units second-hand. They are plentiful and cheap.
That's still... pretty terrible. If we compare you costs for a tape drive against a 14TB easystore @ $190[1], the break-even point is around 72TB. I don't know about you, but that's of data you have to store for it to be worth it. Even at 150TB you're only looking at around ~25% (~$500) in savings compared to hard drive, which I don't think is much when you factor in how much of a hassle tape drives are to work with.
[1] https://slickdeals.net/f/14587381-14tb-wd-easystore-external...
[2] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=solve+y+%3D+500+%2B+%2...
LTO5 onward supports LTFS, which exposes the tape to the OS as if it were any other removable storage, with the one proviso that deleting files doesn't reclaim space unless the entire tape is wiped.
It has been 8+ years since I played with LTFS, so maybe it has improved.
But it looks like the cheapest drive on Newegg for that is $3,299.00: https://www.newegg.com/p/2BM-0046-00001
> In other words, if you have more than about 120 TB of data, then it is cheaper to buy a tape drive. I think any comments about whether tape drives are suitable for home use are really comments about whether you are interested in the use case of people who need to store >120 TB at home.
> If you are running a YouTube channel as a hobby, or you run a side business doing videography for weddings, the tape drive starts to sound a lot better. The 120 TB cutoff might be around 300 hours of video, which might be only 50 events.
No dispute there, but I think most >120 TB home use cases run into the question of if it's even worth it to keep the data (raw/uncompressed). For most people, the answer is probably no, and curation/compression makes far more sense. For instance, I don't think it's even typical for wedding photographers/videographers to store their final product indefinitely, let alone the raw footage for a re-edit. You can keep a lot more events in a lot less space if you're only keep the raw footage for a few recent events and the 15-30 minute final edit for a year after it's finalized.
> And let’s not forget that if you have 120TB of hard drives, you’re in the regime where you start having to buy multiple machines.
Not if you swap disks as offline storage.
> As for longetivity—I don’t have the data handy. If you are storing data on tape, you need to migrate to newer generations of tape, as old generations become obsolete and unavailable. If you are storing on hard disks, you also need to migrate because hard disks eventually fail (even if they are not powered on).
Honestly, the theoretical longevity is the only aspect of tape that appeals to me, but like you said enterprise tapes will end up being like these enterprise optical disks in a fairly short period of time, so you're regularly going to have migration legwork to do or your data's effectively toast.
https://twitter.com/foone/status/1236524992709316608