Spinning rust just refuses to die. So much for existing in a future comprised of all flash, all the time, for all of the things. /sigh
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All that cloud storage has got to exist somewhere.
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Wasn’t the same thing said about long term offline storage for TAPE Drives as well ?
Well, new technologies rarely replace older ones completely , they just find a place alongside them.
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My main issue with LTO is over several quibbles:
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The Tape Drives are ridiculously expensive
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They use Single Spool Cartridges, in a worst case scenario, it’s a nightmare to fish out the tape from the Tape Drive.
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I wish they would use Classical Dual Spool Cartridges like VHS Cassette style or reuse the DCC tape Cassette format and just make them larger to encompass VHS sized Cassette’s, DCC sized Cassette’s, or Sony’s legendary Elcaset size.
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Given how cheap Tape Cassettes were back in the day, a modernized version for consumer data backup should be relatively cheap.
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It’s really not very difficult at all:
2030…
Kind of seems unnecessary to even bother or post.
Lobbyist fill.
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That sounds like a HUGE Pain to deal with.
I’d prefer not having to waste all that time to deal with that kind of BS in a worst case scenario. My time is more precious than “Manually rewinding” all that tape by hand with a torx screw driver.
Having the Tape heads not take the tape out of the Cassettes and just R/W while hovering over the tape is a far better design IMO.
That’s how good traditional Cassette Tape decks work, and I prefer those types of systems.
Last year LTT did a video about the ExaDrive, a 100TB SATA SSD. Costs a whopping 40 grand (US) but it’s the size of a 3.5" drive. Linus even opened it 
Remind me in 8 years
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More like a minor inconvenience. Just takes a little time.
The odds of you ever needing to do that are slim. And how much tape is spooled is up to chance, there might be very little for you to reel in.
That’s really not possible. VHS, DAT, LTO, and almost everything else, all use large rotating heads (helical scan) which can’t be used without pulling the tape out of the cassette.
There’s really no benefit, either. Anyone who’s used compact cassette tapes for a few years has had to deal with the players “eating” tapes, so the “worst case scenario” with a system like that is really actually much worse. The simplified mehanism of LTO avoids many failure scenarios and makes the recovery method quite simple.
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Sony has a “Non Loading” system that they used in the 1990’s
> NT stands for Non-Tracking , meaning the head does not precisely follow the tracks on the tape. Instead, the head moves over the tape at approximately the correct angle and speed, but performs more than one pass over each track. The data in each track is stored on the tape in blocks with addressing information that enables reconstruction in memory from several passes. This considerably reduced the required mechanical precision, reducing the complexity, size, and cost of the recorder.
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> Another feature of NT cassettes is Non-Loading , which means instead of having a mechanism to pull the tape out of the cassette and wrap it around the drum, the drum is pushed inside the cassette to achieve the same effect. This also significantly reduces the complexity, size, and cost of the mechanism.
Not only do you require a tape cartridge big enough for two reels, you also need it bigger to fit the huge head inside?
And you’re lowering accuracy, and therefore data density by a factor of 20 to be able do it?
And you’re doing all of this just to avoid the rare possibility that if your drive suddenly has a complete power failure while in use you might have to spend a few minutes manually spooling the tape back in?
I don’t think I’ll ever understand your thinking, here.
Ease of end user experience
If there’s a way to make the head insert into the cavity to read the tape without “Loading the tape”, then I’ll do that, just to avoid having the tape getting caught in a worse case scenario.
Currently we’re at 4:1 price per byte (ssd:hdd) in retail.
Getting flash prices lower and densities higher is all about how many NAND layers you can stack, and how to make your fab shrink that process further, more so than about going from QLC to PLC necessarily.
It’s kind of sad that we’re moving into a world where the end users will either need to ever increasingly manage their own storage durability (e.g. raid / scrubbing on home nas is a necessity these days), or pay a cloud provider to do that (e.g. in case of phone, laptop, tablet, tv consumer user category).
This divide of “I’m managing durability of my data, vs I’ll pay for recovery due to not having backups” is shifting more towards the general populus (think parent and grandparents).
You aren’t replacing hard drives any time soon, if ever.
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