An LTO6 tape, at about 3TiB, is about $60 and will last five years on the
shelf before you "should" refresh it.

A 3TiB HDD is about $100 and if you aren't running ZFS on it you can expect
some corruption from bit-rot within hours. With ZFS you either have to
worry about keeping all your disks together so you can re-create the zpool
or you will be doing a lot of drive swapping.

With Tape you also get the benefit of a  robotic arm to automatically swap
tapes in and out of the drive. A 32-bay tape library is about $6k. A 32-bay
drive chassis is $10k+

Even at small scale, tape has a considerable advantage for long-term
archive storage.


On Thu, Apr 17, 2014 at 7:18 AM, Chris Schafer <[email protected]> wrote:

> Yeah I am pretty sure the math is bad for tape backups except at the
> largest scales where the power to spin the drives makes it more expensive.
>  Ideally you can find a system to spin the drives down.
>
>
> On Wed, Apr 16, 2014 at 11:11 PM, Michael Dexter <[email protected]
> >wrote:
>
> > On 4/16/14 2:03 PM, Paul Heinlein wrote:
> > > What sort of budget do you have? Do you need a library for hotswapping
> > > tapes? Do you need multiple drives in said library?
> >
> > Large zpools to backup and sneakernets. It sounds like a basic unit
> > would be a good start an no, I didn't think I would ever think of tape
> > again, ever, ever.
> >
> > Thanks for all the suggestions.
> >
> > Michael
> > _______________________________________________
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> > [email protected]
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> >
> _______________________________________________
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>



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