Re: [gentoo-user] Seagate hard drives with dual actuators.

[Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On Sun, Nov 17, 2024 at 6:04 PM Jack <ostroffjh@users.sourceforge.net> wrote:
>
> What about DEC-Tape?  :-)  (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECtape)  (I
> may even have a few left in a closet somewhere, if only I could find
> someone to read them.)
>

LTO is pretty much the only sensible choice these days as I understand
it.  I've looked into it for backup but you need to store a LOT of
data for it to make sense.  The issue is that the drives are just
super-expensive.  You can get much older generation drives used for
reasonable prices, but then the tapes have a very low capacity but
they aren't that cheap, so your cost per TB is pretty high, and of
course you have the inconvenience of long backup times and lots of
tape changes.  The newer generation drives are very reasonable in
terms of cost per TB, but the drives themselves cost thousands of
dollars.  Unless you're archiving hundreds of TB it is cheaper to just
buy lots of USB3 hard drives at $15/TB, and then you get the random IO
performance as a bonus.  The main downside to HDD at smaller scales is
that the drives themselves are more fragile, but that is mostly if
you're dropping them - in terms of storage conditions tape needs
better care than many appreciate for it to remain reliable.

For my offline onsite backups I just use a pair of USB3 drives on ZFS
right now.  For actual storage I'm trying to buy U.2 NVMe for future
expansion, but I don't have a pressing need for that until HDDs die or
I need more space.  Never makes sense to buy more than you need since
all this stuff gets cheaper with time...

-- 
Rich