The problem with really high capacity tape these days is there's almost literally 1 vendor for drives and tapes, which is even worse than the 3 companies worldwide that manufacture hard drives. If you want relatively not so fast storage for a lot of terabytes, I bet I could clone a backblaze storage pod with some modifications and achieve a better $/TB ratio than an enterprise priced tape solution.

There are at least 2 manufacturers for tapes (Fujifilm and Sony), but their tapes are also sold under many other brands (e.g. IBM, Quantum, HP).

The price per TB is currently about $7 or less (per real TB of LTO-8, not per marketing compressed TB), so there is no chance to approach the cost and reliability of tapes using HDDs.

The problem with tapes is that currently the tape drives are very expensive, because their market is small, so you need to store a lot of data before the difference in price between HDDs and tapes exceeds the initial expense for the tape drive.

Nevertheless, if you want to store data for many years, investing in a tape drive may be worthwhile just for the peace of mind, because when storing HDDs for years you can never be sure how will they work when operated again.

> Nevertheless, if you want to store data for many years, investing in a tape drive may be worthwhile just for the peace of mind, because when storing HDDs for years you can never be sure how will they work when operated again.

You'd actually need two tape drives to be reasonably secure, because getting a SATA adapter is much easier if your current setup is broken and you need to access the data either many years later (when technology moved on) or right now.

Having your data on a few hard drives combined with some check-summing and somewhat regular checking is probably easier. Or a combination of both - two different storage systems with two different failure modes are a lot safer. But when you're going that way the break even moves even farther away.

Tape is great for long term storage of archival records, but nobody wants to restore a live virtual machine from 7 years ago.

Depending on the business system you might want your server to be backed up multiple times a day to just weekly, and if you are doing multiple times a day you do want it to be decently fast or to have some extra capacity so as not to slow down normal operations while the backup runs.

Maybe but I imagine automatic daily backups from 5 different machines would be a headache to do with tape.

Right now disks are cheaper than tapes, even if you don't count the very expensive tape readers.

This is incorrect. I recently acquired an LTO-6 tape library; the tapes are <20€ for 2.5TB true capacity (marketing = "6TB compressed".) That's <8€/TB. Disk drives start at 20€/TB for the cheapest garbage.

Sources:

https://geizhals.eu/?cat=zip&xf=1204_LTO-6 (tapes)

https://geizhals.eu/?cat=hde7s&sort=r (disks)

(For completeness, the tape library ran me 500€ on eBay used, but they normally run about twice that. It's a 16-slot library, which coincidentally matches the breakeven - filled for 40TB it's 820€, the same in disks would've been 800€, though I would never buy the cheapest crappy disks.)

FWIW, a major reason for going for tapes for me was that at some point my backup HDDs always ended up used for "real". The tape library frees me from trying to discipline myself to properly separate backup HDDs ;)

For newer tape formats the prices are similar or even a little lower.

For example, at Amazon in Europe an LTO-7 cartridge is EUR 48 for 6 real TB (EUR 8 per real TB), while an LTO-8 cartridge is EUR 84 for 12 real TB (EUR 7 per real TB).

At Amazon USA I see now $48 for LTO-7 and $96 for LTO-8, i.e. $8 per TB if you buy 1 tape. For larger quantities, there are discounts.

Older formats like LTO-6 have the advantage that you may find much cheaper tape drives, but you must handle more cartridges for a given data size.

Currently the cheapest HDDs are the external USB drives with 5400 rpm, which are much slower, about 3 times slower than the tapes, but even those are many times more expensive than the tapes (e.g. $27 ... $30 per TB).

I don't disagree much overall but in my experience cheap or sale drives can beat 15 per TB.

Since someone... disagreed? I'll cite that I recently got a low end 14TB drive for less than $15 per TB, including sales tax. If I pretend it had a 20% VAT and convert that to euros it was actually well under 14€/TB.

That was a better than usual deal but $15/TB is the norm for low end drives with a bit of patience in the US, at least until Chia's influence hit extremely recently.