Reddit reviews Sony LTO-6 Linear Tape Open 6.25TB 2.5 Cache 0.85-Inch Internal Bare or OEM Drives LTX2500G

> The tech is new but I equate this to CRT monitors vs LCD. LCD uses far less materials and yes, its more complicated at first but eventually the process becomes trivial.

CRT was an electron gun mounted between two electromagnets that had to be timed precisely to strike each pixel three times (at different voltages) so that the colors match up as expected. It was a grossly more expensive technology and grossly more complicated one.

LCD is a LED bulb behind a screen. When miniaturization technology caught up to make said screens feasible... then yes, LCDs are cheaper and lighter by design.

---------------------

Similarly, Hard Disks and Magnetic Storage do NOT require the same levels of miniaturization technology that a world-class chip fabrication lab requires. Hard Drives are simply cheaper to make and cheaper to design.

Hell, Tape Drives are still the cheapest, and have been for the better-half of a century at this point.

Solid State is incredibly complicated. I'm not sure if you are appreciating the complexity of a modern 14-nm fabrication lab, or the costs associated with running such a facility. Again, the yields between the two factories is proof enough. NAND Flash Chips, on the best factories available today, have approximately a 70% yield. Hard Drives constantly hit 97%+ yields.

This doesn't even account for the fact that no one has built a 5nm prototype facility yet (three nodes into the future), while HDD makers are already testing out HDMR designs. Moore's law is expected to end at 5nm, because that's the level when electrons start quantum teleporting through Silicon atoms uncontrolled.

The Magnetic Storage industry has begun to march forward again. Not only HDDs, but Tapes (with LTO10 expected to hit 48TB per tape at the same cost as today's tapes).

-----------

SSDs are likely going to win on density, but yields are no longer improving and Moore's law seems to be dying. Future SSDs are going to cost a lot more... or have more cost-cutting measures like TLC.

Let's say you have a 2016 Subaru Outback which has 73.3 ft^3 of cargo space which the largest of the vehicles listed.

What kind of tapes are you talking about? Let's say you're spending big bucks and travelling with Sony's 185 TB tapes. I can't find anything about its dimensions, but let's for the sake of argument say it's similar to an LTO tape and is 4.5" x 4.3" x 1.1" = 21.285 in^3.

73.3 ft^3 = 126,663 in^3, but you're not going to get 100% packing efficiency due to the tape packaging as well as all those edges in the vehicle. Let's call it 80% packing efficiency to be on the very conservative side = 101,330 in^3.

101,330 in^3 / 21.285 in^3 = 4,760 tapes x 185 TB each = 880,600 TB.

Now let's say you're driving from your New York offices to Los Angeles offices. Google Maps says this is 2,789 miles and will take 40 hours.

But you're not going to drive straight through. You gotta eat, refuel, and sleep, and maybe even see a local tourist site. So let's double the time: 80 hours. So you're transferring 880,600 TB in 80 hours = 11,007.5 TB/hour. Google says this is 24,461,111 Mbps.

> I'm not sure about that, but they apparently do use archival backup tapes, which is pretty amazing.

This is actually a bit of a pet peeve of mine. Tape decks are awesome, and are still used all the time. The big reason is that they are amazingly cheap. Here is a 6 TB tape for 30 dollars. If you never want to delete anything, tapes are awesome.

Sony 6.25TB tape for $30.

We use $15 DAT 72 72GB tapes for database backups at my work.

You should look into tape backup as the storage is very cheap (although the drives tend to be expensive). I presume you don't need access to the data often as you say "archiving".

https://www.amazon.com/Sony-Linear-0-85-Inch-Internal-LTX2500G/dp/B00ARHKUZG/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1526860960&sr=8-4&keywords=tape+backup

> No? Magnetic tape is not that great at keeping data. Maybe magnetic disks but definitely not tape. tape gets warped in a ton of different ways waaaay too easily. Not to mention has a super low storage capacity

I used to manage tape backup systems for a medical research university, as well as other formats. If stored properly, tapes are your best bet. As far as capacity? It's the cheapest and densest. Here is 6.5TB for $30. It's just slow.

I think you're looking at the wrong thing, they seem dirt cheap according to this link https://www.amazon.com/Sony-Linear-0-85-Inch-Internal-LTX2500G/dp/B00ARHKUZG