South African data centres using tapes

[Daniel Puchert]

Tapes taking on hard drives in data centres

While solid storage drives (SSDs) have become increasingly popular as a data storage medium in data centres, another much older technology is also reducing demand for hard disk drives (HDDs).

While consumers may be more familiar with magnetic tape for once being the preferred method for storing and viewing analogue video and audio data, it is also valuable for holding digital data.

 

[Mike Hoxbig]

That's all good, until the inevitable...

 

[Lupus]

Yeah, tape is for archiving, much cheaper to store media on there than on hard drives or SSDs. Cloud would call this deep archive or cold storage.

 

[genetic]

We use LTO tapes in broadcast for post production backups. Typical size of the tapes are around 45TB each.

 

[Moosedrool]

Imagine archiving on ssds. Tapes are still widely used in this which makes this article confusing af.

 

[RaptorSA]

This reminds me, time to replace one of those old green drives on my ZFS mirror pool at home.
Just checked and the remaining drive is sitting at 32,195 Hours.

Oooof.... safe to say I got my money's worth out of it... and to think it was one of those external "caddy specials" from back in the 2010's before these f**ers started changing the SATA interface to proprietary so you couldn't pull the drives out of the enclosure and use it.

 

[Quicks]

Depends others are ditching tapes:

DOGE ditches magnetic tape, but experts defend the legacy tech

DOGE recently announced that it has replaced 14,000 magnetic storage tapes used by the US General Services Administration (USGSA) with unspecified "modern" digital formats. The move, which...

www.techspot.com

 

[Swa]

Article is a bit misleading. Tape lifespan is 30 years at rest. HDD is 12 years in use. It does not mean the data is lost if stored offline for longer.

 

[cueball]

Imagine archiving on ssds. Tapes are still widely used in this which makes this article confusing af.

Yeah this is hardly news. Why can't tech articles be written by people with at least a reasonable amount of industry knowledge/experience

 

[genetic]

This reminds me, time to replace one of those old green drives on my ZFS mirror pool at home.
Just checked and the remaining drive is sitting at 32,195 Hours.

Oooof.... safe to say I got my money's worth out of it... and to think it was one of those external "caddy specials" from back in the 2010's before these f**ers started changing the SATA interface to proprietary so you couldn't pull the drives out of the enclosure and use it.

View attachment 1818592


View attachment 1818598

View attachment 1818599

My 2TB Seagate HDD sitting at double that time - over 60,000hrs

 

[genetic]

My 2TB Seagate HDD sitting at double that time - over 60,000hrs

View attachment 1818696

And my External 8TB Quadra at almost 78,000 hours!

 

[RedViking]

Nothing wrong with tape and still the most reliable for long term storage.

 

[cueball]

Nothing wrong with tape and still the most reliable for long term storage.

Exactly. But the article is claiming that tape is somehow displacing SSDs which is preposterous, they are 2 different tiers of storage with vastly different purposes.