Re:Tape Storage Might Be Computing’s Climate Savior
by dabiged on Thursday August 17, 2023 @01:36AM
(#37157653)
I think a lot of people have also been burned by the continuous new rollout of tape formats.
People invest in tape because it offers long term offsite storage, but vendors only offer drive life spans in the order of 4-6 years. After this they rollout higher capacity drives/cartridges and force everyone to refresh their entire hardware and tape collection because they end of life equipment. This costs millions of dollars for a medium sized enterprise.
LTO5 was released in 2010. It offers all the feature of a LTO9 tape (encryption, compression, RFID chips, partitioning, LTFS support) only with much less space per cartridge. These LTO5 cartridges are still readable with very low error rates regardless of how they were stored 13 years later, but sourcing drives is getting more difficult every year.
Tape media needs the equivalent of an LTS Operating System release, where a vendor will guarantee the drives, libraries and cartridge formats will be manufactured, supported and maintained for 20+ years.
People invest in tape because it offers long term offsite storage, but vendors only offer drive life spans in the order of 4-6 years. After this they rollout higher capacity drives/cartridges and force everyone to refresh their entire hardware and tape collection because they end of life equipment. This costs millions of dollars for a medium sized enterprise.
LTO5 was released in 2010. It offers all the feature of a LTO9 tape (encryption, compression, RFID chips, partitioning, LTFS support) only with much less space per cartridge. These LTO5 cartridges are still readable with very low error rates regardless of how they were stored 13 years later, but sourcing drives is getting more difficult every year.
Tape media needs the equivalent of an LTS Operating System release, where a vendor will guarantee the drives, libraries and cartridge formats will be manufactured, supported and maintained for 20+ years.