It's amazing how much cheaper spinning disks have gotten over the years. We should all be archiving more IMO.
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Spinning disks are kind of expensive. I'm paying about $3.00/TB for LTO5 tape. The cheapest refurb hard drives are still about $15/TB.
I usually buy from ServerPartDeals and goHardDrive. I missed out on a really great refurb sale of 12TB Seagate drives that were $74.99 each, but even now, you can find 12TB disks for $89.99.
My only problem with LTO5 tapes is the amount required to do backup. Were I going to do LTO, I'd have to go with LTO9 since they hold 18/45TB and are around $90 a tape.
$74.99 for 12TB is still twice as expensive as the LTO 5 tapes I'm getting on ebay. The LTO drive was pretty cheap too, so I'm still way ahead in my 200TB archive with regards to price. The other thing I like about tape is that is has a physical write-protect notch, so if my systems were infected with some ransomware, it wouldn't be able to touch my tapes even if I have a tape in the drive. Plug a hard drive in and you could be instantly fucked by the ransomware.
I'm not sure how much write-protection would be useful in practice. If you're restoring from backups after a malware infection, you wouldn't directly restore on the infected system. You would first reinstall the OS/restore some earlier snapshot and then restore the data.
The point is you may not know a system is infected. There's more use cases for storing data on tape than only making backups. We clear data off spinning disks that we aren't actively working on. When we need it again, we get it from the tape. With a hard drive, you plug it in and the compromised system can infect the hard drive without you knowing. The malware doesn't have to actively destroy things for it to be a problem, it can take action at a later date, so with hard drives they can be a problem even when you don't know you've been compromised, and even after you've fixed the compromise if you've ever plugged in that hard drive while you were compromised. There is no write-protect on a hard drive that I know of. Tapes even come in "WORM" variety which is write-once, once you write data to the tape it can't be changed or erased.
Thanks for the explanation,I didn't consider this other use case. There are some ways of making a SATA connection read-only [0], but surely not as convenient as flipping a switch on a tape.
[0] https://www.nightofthedead.org/security/hardware-write-prote...
Of course tape can't be beat, always great for offline / offsite archival. I was talking about more ergonomic online archiving without including tape robots ;) Even if price per spinning TB didn't fall much since the pandemic started - IIRC I couldn't have bought a 20TB prosumer disk new for ~$300 then.
It's great that both are relatively cheap as they both have their advantages and use cases. Mostly depends on how "hot" your archives need to be.
For "Hot" backup I have two mirrored RAID 10 systems (one in a detached garage, so technically "off site"), so I could lose up to 4 drives without losing any data. That's where the cheap hard drive storage comes in handy. One of those systems runs 24/7, so I pay a premium for spinning disks because availability is what that's all about. The "off site" system kind of a cold-storage backup system with the LTO tape drive in it. That system does weekly backups, and it also acts like a buffer for all the less "hot" data that mostly goes almost straight to tape until it's needed again.
I waited for years for used datacenter tape drives to become affordable. The math for DVD or hard drive cold storage didn't make sense, especially since I like redundant backups so it's 2x the cost. Tapes were designed for cold storage and it's faster and more cost effective than backing up to hard drives. Maybe I'll change my tune someday after a tape unravelling disaster if that ever happens, but in 2 years it's been pretty reliable.
>The cheapest refurb hard drives are still about $15/TB.
Huh? I just bought some 10TB refurb drives from Amazon for $60 each.
Still twice as expensive per TB as the LTO 5 tapes I'm getting on ebay.
Hard drives don't require an ultra-expensive tape drive to use, plus a computer somehow capable of actually holding and connecting to that drive. From what I read, you can't even connect one of these things to a normal computer: they have SAS interfaces, so you need a computer with a SAS HBA just to install the thing, and you only find those on server-grade hardware. You're not going to plug one of these things into your laptop.
A typical SATA HDD, by contrast, can be connected to any common consumer-grade motherboard, or you can just get a USB HDD dock if you really need to.
>Hard drives don't require an ultra-expensive tape drive to use
I bought an LTO 5 tape drive for $150. Do you really think that's "ultra expensive"? I do not. In fact I purchased 3 more LTO 5 drives for another $150 (I got lucky on that deal). These are all used datacenter hardware, tons of them on eBay now. The price is really not what you might be thinking it is.
> plus a computer somehow capable of actually holding and connecting to that drive
I have lots of computers, my backup computer is an old server of mine which is still very capable. It's just an old i5 computer, gaming motherboard, 16GB RAM but it can sustain 140MB/s write speed to the tapes. Good luck getting that sustained write speed on a refurb hard drive.
>they have SAS interfaces, so you need a computer with a SAS HBA just to install the thing
Yes, it cost me a total of $30, again from eBay. Not too expensive at all. I have purchased about 6 SAS cards from eBay for various computers (I have 3 RAID10 setups), none have failed, all have been very reliable, and they are all very inexpensive and easy to install.
> and you only find those on server-grade hardware.
You find them all over eBay for cheap. I installed these SAS cards in "gaming" motherboards. No, you do not need specialized "server-grade hardware" to install them into.
>You're not going to plug one of these things into your laptop.
Duh, laptops are for portability. If all you have is one single laptop you probably aren't doing anything serious anyway, and likely have no need for massive amounts of storage. I have desktops, servers, and laptops, and I use them all appropriately.
>A typical SATA HDD, by contrast, can be connected to any common consumer-grade motherboard, or you can just get a USB HDD dock if you really need to.
That's great, but it's still 2x more expensive per TB to hoard hundreds of TB of data. And hard drives do not have a write-protect notch, so as soon as you connect any hard drive to a compromised computer (whether you know it's compromised or not) you compromise the backup too.
Tapes were made for off-line long-term storage, hard drives were not. I have plenty of hard drives, but I know what they are for and I use them appropriately. I also know what tapes are for, and my life as a datahoarder has been far better (and more affordable) since I got the tape drives.
>I bought an LTO 5 tape drive for $150. Do you really think that's "ultra expensive"? I do not.
I do, because that's a BS price. I just looked on Ebay, and while there's a bunch of LTO-5 drives for somewhere around that price, they're all broken, "parts only". Actual working drives are much, much more expensive. $500 or more for just a drive isn't cheap.
Bullshit. There are plenty of working LTO5 drives for cheap on ebay.
$159 https://www.ebay.com/itm/286135602395 tested, working
$150 https://www.ebay.com/itm/267042154733
$120 https://www.ebay.com/itm/286121532918 - fully working
$179 https://www.ebay.com/itm/267036935814 - tested, working
Go troll somewhere else.