Hacker News Reader

Comment by doughnutstracks | Hacker News Reader

I came across this website that provides LTO tape pricing references (I have no affiliation with the site).

LTO-10 30TB: $259–$300 per cartridge (~$8.63–$10/TB) LTO-10 40TB: $491–$555 per cartridge (~$12.28–$13.88/TB) LTO-9 18TB: $92–$129 per cartridge (~$5.14–$7.17/TB)

https://tapebackup.org/lto-tape-price-trend/lto10-price

One thing worth noting is that the tape cartridges themselves aren't necessarily the biggest expense. Standalone LTO-10 drives are currently listed at around $25,000.

View on HN

> One thing worth noting is that the tape cartridges themselves aren't necessarily the biggest expense. Standalone LTO-10 drives are currently listed at around $25,000.

The drives are a fairly fixed CapEx: once they're purchased they don't cost must/anything to run. You may replace them every few years with newer tech for higher capacities of course.

Libraries/robotics last even longer, and can stick around for a decade or more once purchased.

> LTO-10 30TB: $259–$300 per cartridge (~$8.63–$10/TB) LTO-10 40TB: $491–$555 per cartridge (~$12.28–$13.88/TB) LTO-9 18TB: $92–$129 per cartridge (~$5.14–$7.17/TB)

Just a note: do NOT buy LTO-10 right now. The capacity increase is not worth the price bump, and the drives are still very new. There are still no half-height drives for tape libraries available, for example.

What makes the drives so expensive? Is it just the fact that they're still pretty niche?

It's niche, yes. But also an incredibly high-precision mechanical device, designed for constant operation.

But the fact that -ALL- LTO drive-mechanisms are build by IBM maybe also doesn't help the pricing...

They were pretty expensive when other manufacturers were still in the business too, to be fair to IBM.

no reason to sell on lower margin here, the competition is pretty much only the cost to store it on HDDs

also newness.

when I was dealing with tape, LTO-6 drives were really really expensive, but LTO-5 wasn't sure you got an extra 1/3rd of space per tape, and some speed.

Right now, the list price for LTO8 is about 2/3rds the list price of LTO9. In single units, LTO9 drives are around £8k. As soon as you buy 25-40 of them and a robot, the per unit cost drops dramatically

Yes, drives are very expensive and that's why there is a business for renting them. Even Amazon Snowball offered that [1]. There are other rental services such as [2] but many of them are not LTO-10 yet (don't know if it really matters right now).

[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/snowball/latest/developer-guide/...

[2] https://mediastoragegroup.com/

You don't need a $25,000 LTO-10 drive, $100,000 library, and $300 tapes. The drives are frequently backwards compatible multiple generations, so your archives are safe. You can get LTO-7, LTO-8, and LTO-9 libraries for cheap (right now there are lots of LTO-7 standalone drives for under $1000 on ebay), as they've aged out of enterprise leases.

That's got worse recently. LTO used to be guaranteed compatible two generations back; an LTO-7 drive can read LTO-6 and LTO-5 tape. With newer standards, they've cut that to one generation. Your point stands, but folks should be aware the treadmill has been sped up in the past few years.

Ouch, only one generation now? Back in the day, we started with a second-hand LTO-3 tape library, then upgraded to an LTO-5 when that died. I remember learning about this stuff (we were only an SME, not an enterprise, so didn't have any knowledge about these things), and realising we'd have to be careful with our upgrade plan.

The comment you're replying to is outdated. LTO-8 and LTO-9 had one generation of backwards compatibility. LTO-10 has none.

You got me briefly excited, but the only LTO-7 drives on eBay under $1000 are listed as parts-only. The price jump from LTO-6 to LTO-7 has remained steep for years; either industry is holding on to them, or they're being resold or released successfully.

You're right, I didn't catch the (For Parts Only) labels when you click into the auctions. It looks like there are some working LTO-7 drive sleds that can be adapted into storage vaults for under $1000, though you're in for another $1000-$2500 for the vault.

On top of the price, I think most of the LTO drives have minimum speeds that need to be sustained in order to avoid drive starts and stops or shoeshining where the heads repeatedly go over the same section of tape waiting for data. That'll slow down the backup or prematurely wear out your data.

And the minimum speeds for something like LTO-7 is 100MB/s so you do need to work a bit to make sure your LTO drive will get fed properly (e.g. cache and consolidate small files so that you're doing sequential reads during the backup).

You should not attempt to write LTO tapes from HDDs.

You need to write them from NVMe SSDs, to ensure an adequate write throughput. The NVMe SSDs could be on a different computer, if you have an intermediate Ethernet connection that is fast enough, of at least 10 Gb/s where the line rate is really reached (but 25 Gb/s Ethernet may be needed for the latest LTO variants).

If you have enough memory on the computer where the tape drive is attached, you can use a RAM drive to store a file before writing it to the tape, and then it does not matter from where the file comes. This is actually what I do, the server with the tape drive has 128 GB of memory, so there is no problem to transfer there through the network 50 GB archive files into the RAM disk, from where the archive files are written to the tape.

When I was dealing with tape the main problem was that the drives were very expensive, and they never lasted as long as their expense would have you hope. They have a complex exposed mechanism full of fairly fragile tiny plastic parts.

And for long term archive storage, the main problem is not the media, it is how are you going to read the media. With the drives being considerably more fragile that the tapes. A good plan is to store an entire spare restoration kit with the media. With the understanding it probably will not work when it needs to. So store the really critical stuff printed out so the mark one eyeball can parse it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com