> The drives are huge, noisy, expensive, and they have a very quick deprecation policy (new drives cant use old tapes).

Sure but old drives are widely available at low prices.

buildbot 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This is true - I got a fiber channel LTO-8 FH drive off ebay brand new in the IBM packaging for less than 750$ Tapes are 60; so breaking even against 15$ per TB HDDs is pretty fast.

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AshamedCaptain 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

No, they are not. Specially when you have to find the one drive that will read your tapes , connect to your computer, and many other constraints that a user will have.

	▲	adrian_b 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The connection to a computer does not have any special challenges, except that the computer must be a desktop with a free PCIe slot. Unless you have a server motherboard with an on-board SAS controller, you need to buy a SAS HBA card, put it in your desktop and also buy a compatible SAS cable, in order to connect an LTO tape drive to the computer. New tape drives are extremely expensive, e.g. $4500 for the last generation of LTO-9 tapes (18 TB/cartridge), but if you store at least a few hundred TB of data you recover the cost of the drive from the cost difference between HDDs and tape cartridges. I have an older LTO-7 (6 TB/cartridge) tabletop drive, which has cost me $3000 about 7 or 8 years ago (new), and there are several years since I have recovered its cost. If you do not intend to store more than 100 TB, the cheapest solution is to buy external HDDs, but for long term storage you must plan to migrate the data periodically, as the lifetime of HDDs is hard to predict and unlikely to be much greater than 5 years.