--- On Thu, 9/30/10, Ed Chejlava <[email protected]> wrote:
> From: Ed Chejlava <[email protected]>
> Subject: [AP] tape backup was:: firewire is disappearing
> To: [email protected]
> Date: Thursday, September 30, 2010, 1:00 PM
>
> >If some company would put a few brain cells together,
> they'd realize
> >there's a market for an AFFORDABLE desktop LTO4 or LTO5
> drive. LTO
> >tapes are relatively cheap but the LTO4 and later
> drives are insane
> >prices, even for used ones. $1,500 or more for a tape
> drive?! The
> >tapes can be found for $40 or less. Used LTO1/2/3
> drives can be
> >found for decent prices, but their uncompressed
> capacity has lagged
> >behind newer hard drives.
>
> Gregg:
>
> I used to work on an enterprise backup/recover app
> (NetWorker) so I'm
> pretty familiar with high-end tape drives. I've
> talked with HP, IBM
> and Quantum about the large market waiting for a USB
> interface LTO3
> or 4 drive, but the volumes they run at are so low that the
> prices
> remain high, and they don't care to risk trying to enter a
> new
> "low-end" market, no matter how profitable it might
> become.
The price has to come down to make a larger market. An external LTO4 with eSATA
and USB 3.0 with a mid three figure price, combined with a good *marketing
plan* would create the market.
I'd package kits of an external LTO4 drive, an 800 gig hard drive and one tape.
That would put the whole deal in one purchase. It would also be a good plan to
work with large PC OEMs to include internal LTO drives in systems aimed at the
high end and 'prosumer' market segments as well as people who buy lots of
downloaded music, movies and software.
Get the benefits in the public eye. Super high speed. The security, convenience
and *simplicity* of being able to back up everything to ONE tape and especially
the ability to directly access individual files due to them not being
compressed. The default ought to be no compression because like the built in
compression Windows has had since NT* it's pretty much useless for the minor
savings in storage space.
*Which Apple has only now implemented in 10.6 long after such compression is
obsolete. What's worse is there apparently is no way to turn that "feature" off.
Telling people about a product is still the best way to drive sales. If it's
not something 'sexy' that the news media and popular entertainment will pick up
on and do a ton of free publicity, then it takes some work to get the word out.
One recent example of a huge market failure was the revival of the Pontiac GTO
based on an Australian Holden. Pontiac sent out millions of fancy flyers "Meet
the new Pontiacs", but they had not one word or image on the GTO. Pontiac sunk
their own car because of an incredibly stupid decision to not tell anyone the
car existed!
A LTO drive aimed at the general consumer market would absolutely be a failure
IF the manufacturer refuses to do the required hard and heavy marketing to tell
people why they need it.
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