Why are tape drives so frigging expensive?

goobee

Platinum Member
Aug 3, 2001
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goobee.org
Damn things are slow, capacity is limited, but yet, a drive + tapes will set you back a bunch of bucks. :disgust:

 

trmiv

Lifer
Oct 10, 1999
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No kidding. We just payed like $1500 for a Sony AIT2 drive. And the tapes are like $50-70 each!
 

kt

Diamond Member
Apr 1, 2000
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When you have to keep a month worth of backup archive, you'll see the differences in the cost.
 

Viper GTS

Lifer
Oct 13, 1999
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I had the same question last night, I was looking for an efficient way to back up 500-750 GB.

Looks like there is no good way to do it, short of buying more HD's.

Viper GTS
 

Fiveohhh

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Jan 18, 2002
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was just looking into this the other day. decided to go with dvdr back ups. Longer shelflife and cheaper. but if needed to backup 20-30-150 gigs, tapes would be a lot easier than all those dvds. we really only need to BU about 3-4 gigs worth of stuff, but 20 gbs would save some hassle if things took a turn for the worse
 

Ogg

Diamond Member
Sep 5, 2003
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Lets see ................
I run two SuperDLTtape drives at our office.

speed-------->@400MB/sec Youre wrong

capacity-------->one tape can hold over 200GB Youre wrong

and yeah they are very expensive but its business data backup goober:p





*******Theres is now a 300GB firewire/usb2 external harddrive that ships with retrospect (backup software) already on it for automated backups.........Its very sweet for a home machine.
And its relatively cheap........go get it:D
 

zimu

Diamond Member
Jun 15, 2001
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enormous capacity, more than DVD's, long shelflife, rare in home machines- mostly used in businesses for backups, they have money to spend for backup
 

NFS4

No Lifer
Oct 9, 1999
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Originally posted by: Viper GTS
I had the same question last night, I was looking for an efficient way to back up 500-750 GB.

Looks like there is no good way to do it, short of buying more HD's.

Viper GTS

500-750GB? WTF? MP3's??? Movies??? PORN???

If it's movies, why not just by the real thing?:confused:
 

goobee

Platinum Member
Aug 3, 2001
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Originally posted by: Ogg
Lets see ................
I run two SuperDLTtape drives at our office.

speed-------->@400MB/sec Youre wrong

capacity-------->one tape can hold over 200GB Youre wrong

and yeah they are very expensive but its business data backup goober:p

Yeah, there are high end stuff of course, but I was referring more to the more affordable stuff. Those are slow, limited in capacity and still expensive. Not everyone wants or can afford the high end stuff.

 

Viper GTS

Lifer
Oct 13, 1999
38,107
433
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Originally posted by: NFS4
Originally posted by: Viper GTS
I had the same question last night, I was looking for an efficient way to back up 500-750 GB.

Looks like there is no good way to do it, short of buying more HD's.

Viper GTS

500-750GB? WTF? MP3's??? Movies??? PORN???

If it's movies, why not just by the real thing?:confused:

Movies & music, no porn. Our media alone right now is up to ~250 GB, & we have a lot more waiting to be ripped/encoded.

I expect our 450 GB span to be full in less than a year, & that does not include anything else we have stored on our server(s).

Biggest problem is that a lot of the tape backup systems rely on compression to get their storage capacity. The stuff we need to back up won't compress for sh!t.

Viper GTS
 

spliffstar69

Golden Member
Oct 10, 2000
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Not much available on the low end side of tape drive no money to be made in that segment.

Its all high-end enterprise class currently the highest speed/capacity drive is a SDLT 600 from Quantum

up to 600GB Compressed 300GB Native on 1 tape and Real world transfer speeds at about 1000-1500 mbs

but you talking about 6 Grand for that drive and a few tapes to go with it.


But the reason tapes are still around is tape's reliability and portability.
 

Ogg

Diamond Member
Sep 5, 2003
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Originally posted by: spliffstar69
Not much available on the low end side of tape drive no money to be made in that segment.

Its all high-end enterprise class currently the highest speed/capacity drive is a SDLT 600 from Quantum

up to 600GB Compressed 300GB Native on 1 tape and Real world transfer speeds at about 1000-1500 mbs

wow I need one of those, makes our office setup look like crap:D
 

bockchow

Platinum Member
Sep 18, 2001
2,156
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toms has a story on converting a $60 dv camcorder into a tape drive that
can save 15GB onto a 2 dollar tape. link i never looked into just glanced at it and sent it off to a buddy wonder is he ever did it.