Tape drives - do modern SATA tape drives exist?

[VirtualLarry]

I remember the old-school tape drives, they were SCSI and floppy based. QIC and friends, and DAT, and DLT.

Do they still make these? Does anyone still use tape for backup? Or have the low price of HDs (external I guess), made tapes completely obsolete?

Just wondering if it would be possible to make a SATA tape drive, that used recording media similar to HDs, that could store gobs of data on one tape. Like 5TB or something.

Or has WHS obsoleted standalone backup solutions?

 

[Rubycon]

Dell has an external cartridge based backup system that connects to your server via USB. The cartridges are actually notebook drives with a sata interface. 😀

Aside from that, I've only seen tape drives that are parallel SCSI based. They are expensive when you get into the TB range, as are the tapes. Transfer speeds are decent but random access (of course) is silly slow.

 

[Nothinman]

I doubt anyone still uses tape for personal backups because of the cost, but they're still heavily used by businesses.

 

[Emulex]

SAS - everything is sas now.

4 lane for mucho bandwidth. SF-8088

 

[alaricljs]

Quantum LTO-5 - 1.5TB raw capacity and a 6Gbps SAS interface:

http://www.quantum.com/Products/TapeDrives/LTOUltrium/LTO-5/Index.aspx

 

[thescreensavers]

I havent seen a tape drive since like the 90s 😛

 

[Dark Shroud]

You can still buy them, despite what some people think tape drives are still commonly used for back up in the business world and the tech is still being developed. Simply because they fair better when stored than hard drives.

I have an old tape drive with several 400mb cartriges somewhere in storage. I got it free but I never used it because I didn't have the drivers/software for it.