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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

gr8. Sony and Fuji have a fight and they'll both lose since people committed to LTO tape will move on. Gotta love those patent lawyers.

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What will they move to?

The cloud (company who wrote this article) or hard drives.

Can hard drives store long term like LTO tapes?

The article (which is obviously biased keep in mind) makes the argument that even LTO isn't really long term due to compatibility issues between tape generations - you have to keep migrating your tapes since new machines can't read older tape densities.

Realistically, companies keep making older generation tape drives for a long time, for example, HP LTO-5 drives are still widely available from normal vendors like Newegg. And except for one discontinuity that's pretty clearly due to the change from metal particulate to BaFe, which is at the heart of this patent dispute, LTO offers two generation back read capability, and one generation back write capability: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open#Compatibility

Backblaze use hard drives, and there system seems to be incredibly fault tolerant and long lasting.

I have read external hard drives that sat unused for 15 years. Hypothetically the bearings might dry out or something but I haven't seen one fail.

One the other hand I have chronically had problems with tapes I couldn't read, had spots of data corruption, or that took 18 hours to restore a 1500 byte file.

Part of it is that the use of tapes is less routine so it is a common mistake to think you wrote a good tape but you didn't check it and it's unreadable.

Another competitor for LTO tapes is BD-XL, which is more expensive per unit TB but the drives are cheaper.

What generation of tape technology exhibited the problems you describe? I've never suffered such problems with original 1/2 mag tapes, DDS, or LTO.

BD-XL is wildly more expensive than LTO, although that won't matter if you can't get LTO to be reliable for you. Just checking now, B & H Photo which tends to have good prices and a good supply chain, $54.57 for 10 100GB BD-XL or a terabyte (https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1101544-REG/verbatim_...), not so cutting edge and still with competition LTO-6 from Fujifilm, quantity 20, $11/TB (https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1096090-REG/fujifilm_...). We also have a problem with no one worth trusting making cheapest single level BDR discs, the least worst is CMC, and I wonder how long before BD-XL sufferer the same problem.

Did you not read TFA? It's explicitly an ad pitching cloud storage as a solution to customers fed up on waiting for Sony and Fuji to sort out the lawsuits surrounding LTO-8.

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