> why don't we ever see pro-sumer priced tape drives? The technology behind capable LTO drives is now more than 10 years old, shouldn't we see some reductions in price now

First, LTO drives are conceptually simple, but if you've ever opened one up you'll know they are a feat of horribly complex engineering.

Second, they are not a commodity product. Infact thanks to the magic cloud they are even LESS of a commodity product than they were 10 years ago because lots of people have either wholesale moved to the cloud or use S3 for backup.

1 + 2 = Low volume product with lots of parts crammed into it = high manufacturing cost = high price.

The orgs who still use LTO in their infra are the sort of orgs who don't blink at the price tag. The cost of the CTO's farts is probably more than a 5k tape drive.

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amelius 2 days ago | parent [-]

> Second, they are not a commodity product.

Are you sure, there's millions of small-to-medium businesses that could use a good and cheap backup solution for terabytes of data.

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kjellsbells a day ago | parent | next [-]

Back in the era when Zip drives were around, there was a prosumer/SMB tape standard: 1/4-inch QIC. I sold many PCs with a tape drive in one of the drive bays. They were awesome.

They also sucked from a support point of view. People would mistreat the tape. Store them next to giant magnets or on top of the microwave in the restaurant. Forget to run the weekly backup and then blame you when they lost files. I couldn't wait to get them on to CD-RW which showed up for SMBs very soon afterwards in the late 1990s, and then eventually to the cloud. What a relief to no longer need magnetic media.

The irony now is that many of the SMBs I see today (though I no longer consult for them) have effectively zero backup because all their business process is tied up in a SaaS that they do not control. Eg their website is on squarespace, their tasks are on Asana, and their finances are in Quickbooks. Any one of these goes dark, or out of business, or is vandalized and it's curtains for the whole business.

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mingus88 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Backup to NAS is a much better solution for a SMB

My experience with tape is very out of date but I doubt much has changed due to the nature of tape

Tape software sucks. Tape restores are cumbersome. A SMB can literally but a multi TB HDD and just drag and drop, and but the drive in a safe.

A SMB will need to hire someone who wants to deal with this niche tape storage, and why would they bother if they can use a NAS for that and a dozen other things at the same time

Tapes can have a shelf life of 30 years. If you need archival storage then tape is a great solution. For everybody else it’s more trouble than it’s worth.

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Ekaros 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

How many of them have actual need for terabytes of storage? And I mean business continuity critical one.

Overall they are much better of buying a few external HDDs. Standard interface, sufficient capacity. Just get trusted person to carry one out every month or three months. For continuous stuff just have NAS.

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traceroute66 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> millions of small-to-medium businesses that could use a good and cheap backup solution for terabytes of data.

Yes, and that's exactly how small-to-medium business IT used to operate.

These days sadly most small-to-medium businesses are drinking the cloud koolaid.

You would be hard pushed to find a small-biz with a comms room these days, when back in the day every half-decent small-biz office would have a comms room with cab and a few servers in it.

Now most small-biz are on Microsoft or Gmail for mail and their office is full of laptops on WiFi.... nobody has any respect for good old-fashioned structured cabling these days either, sadly. ;(

It is what it is, sadly.

Hence only governments, enterprises and, ironically (if rumours are correct) the cloud providers (for their archival S3 products) are still buying tape.