Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by VikingCoder | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

VikingCoder

I have a normal PC...

I'd love some kind of external tape drive that I can connect with USB-C, or USB-3...

But everything is SAS? And no way to convert SAS to SATA?

Recommendations?

View on HN

The cheapest option is to get a SAS pcie card and a new drive like https://www.ebay.com/itm/198052084090 or try a much cheaper used drive.

LTO drives are expensive but they are very well designed and it is the most reliable portable storage format available. Full LTO tapes in a good fire rated safe really provide a fantastic sense of security. The cost of the drive is amortized over the total bytes you store.

Those tapes in a fire rated safe give a sense of security before the fire.

After the fire, it is likely that the tapes and the papers in the safe are a pile of ash. Fire-rated safes often don't survive fires especially if you live in wildfire country.

I mean a UL 72 Class 125 rated safe or file cabinet with a 2-hour fire endurance rating

No recommendations, just brings back memories of the “good old days” with QIC-80 tapes and ZIP drives, both of which came with “desktop” in mind.

I still have a ZIP drive around with a parallel port connector. I haven’t owned a computer with a parallel port in 20+ years.

I probably also have a QIC-80 tape drive around somewhere.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarter-inch_cartridge

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_drive

SLR100 for life!

It would be neat if someone resurrected Iomega and launched the 2026 version of the Zip drive for local backup. It'd be something like $200 (same as the original Zip drive) and it would take 20TB WORM tapes that cost $20 each. There would be some kind of horrible limitation, like it would take 2 months 24/7 to actually write 20TB, but it would come with simple software that rapaciously grabbed your whole cloud life and local data, and the tapes would last forever.

I just looked, and iomega.com seems to be some kind of malware site. Sad.

No recommendations, but you can get a thunderbolt to SAS adapter; they aren't cheap though.

Try searching for thunderbolt lto.

I know MagStor has one with usb-c presentation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com