Why are tape drives so frigging expensive?

[goobee]

Damn things are slow, capacity is limited, but yet, a drive + tapes will set you back a bunch of bucks. :disgust:

 

[trmiv]

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

 

[kt]

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

 

[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

 

[Fiveohhh]

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]

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😛





*******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😀

 

[zimu]

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]

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?😕

 

[goobee]

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😛

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]

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?😕

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]

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]

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😀

 

[FoBoT]

tapes are for datacenters

 

[bockchow]

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.