That moment you realize tape drives aren't actually dead

I was helping a guy last week at a small office in Phoenix who insisted on using tape for their nightly backups. I told him that's old tech, until he showed me their LTO-9 drive doing 300MB/s compression. Made me think about how I've been reliant on cloud storage for everything, but tape is still way cheaper per GB for cold storage. Anyone else run into legacy hardware that surprised you with how good it still works?

3 comments

3 Comments

michaelchen24d ago

300MB/s is impressive, but that's compressed data. Uncompressed LTO-9 tops out around 400MB/s native, and the 300MB/s number usually refers to 2.5:1 compression, so real world performance depends on your file types.

jessicac2816d ago

Oh man, that is a good point and honestly kind of a bummer if you're dealing with mostly uncompressed stuff like video or already compressed archives. I've definitely been burned by that before, thinking I was getting blazing speeds only to realize my file types were killing the compression ratio. It makes the whole "300MB/s" marketing number feel a little misleading when your actual workflow is just a bunch of mp4s or zips. Feels like you really gotta look at your specific data before getting too excited about those top-line specs. It's one of those things that sounds amazing on paper but reality can be a real buzzkill.

wrenh6524d ago

Did you ever get a chance to run some real world tests with your own data? I was in the same boat, thinking tape was basically a museum piece until a client showed me how his LTO-9 handled his media files. It was like @michaelchen said, the compression variable matters a lot, but seeing it in action definitely changed my mind.