This 9TB magnetic tape can still outperform SSD or hard drives

There’s one vital way tape still trounces SSDs and hard drives

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Those born in the 1980s may have warm memories of storage tape, but magnetic ribbons have long been replaced by shiny coasters, silicon chips andcloud storagefor anyone wanting to store data.

But thetechnology is not dead yet - you can buy cheap LTO-7 tapes and get 9TB of native storage (22.5TB compressed) once they are reformatted to M8, such as theQuantum LTO-7 tape for as little as $57.77.

With an uncompressed capacity of 9TB, this translates into a per TB cost of $6.42, about 12x less than thecheapest SSDon the market and 1/4 the price of the12TB Seagate Exos X14, currently the most affordable hard disk drive on the market on a per TB basis.

Capacity

In other words, if you want a LOT of capacity, nothing beats the good old magnetic tape - although you will need to factor in the cost of the drive.

There’s something else that tape provides that no other storage medium currently offers by default; on-the-fly, transparent compression which can go up to 2.5:1; although this works best on text files rather than on multimedia ones, as they are already heavily compressed.

As for transfer speeds, they can reach 300MBps (that’s a staggering 1.08TB per hour) which is plenty fast, slower than thePNY Pro Elitewhich tops 375MBps.

Even though tape has a retro feeling to it, it is still the preferred, most widely used archiving medium thanks partly to a 30-year archival life and lifetime warranty on almost all tapes on sale.

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Just bear in mind that the price above doesn’t take into consideration the price of an LTO drive, which can cost around $2,600 (e.g.this Quantum LTO-7 drive) for a bare internal drive so that it only makes sense to get this if you plan any capacity above 100TB.

Désiré has been musing and writing about technology during a career spanning four decades. He dabbled inwebsite buildersandweb hostingwhen DHTML and frames were in vogue and started narrating about the impact of technology on society just before the start of the Y2K hysteria at the turn of the last millennium.

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