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Comment by MrFoof | Hacker News Reader

Yep, though it depends on the use case. If you want truly cold storage that's super rarely accessed, LTO tape is really hard to beat on $/TB!

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If the TB is less than ~20, then the equation breaks since you have buy the unit in addition to the tape. So, yeah, it depends on use but I would argue on the consumer level most people aren't storing that much data. But I could be wrong.

I think it's a lot more than 20TB - contemporary LTO drives are on the order of $10k!

You don't really need to buy the latest and greatest unit, or buy new, and both the drive and tapes last for an unreasonably long amount of time on tech timescales. It's not just that tapes have the best dollar to gigabyte ratio, they are also the most durable.

I can't help but think that, between entrusting data to a freshly manufactured HDD and tapes run through an affordable used LTO drive of unknown history and wear, that the HDD is the safer bet?

That's why you don't entrust your data to a storage device. You verify your backups, immediately after creation and periodically afterwards.

To be fair, I was talking really about enterprise, where the bulk of HDD sales still are -- especially in any meaningful capacity. Moreover, enterprise is where tape lives.

HDDs are quickly Falling off in the consumer space because SSDs are getting cheap enough, power consumption matters (for laptops), form factor matters (again, for laptops), and mobile entirely changed peoples' expectations of system responsiveness.

Even 20 years ago, the number of people (consumers, not businesses) I knew with tape drives was almost none. Today I know of zero.

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