[SAGE-AU] Re: [Talk] Reality check...

[John Stern]

Daniel O'Connor wrote:
> > IDEA:
> > The cost of DLT & LTO tape media is ~$3/Gb.
> > The cost of commodity IDE drives is ~$1-2/Gb.  IDE enclosures with
> > either Firewire or USB are cheap & readily available.
> 
> IDE costs around $3/Gb too.
9940's (60GB) cost about $240 an 80GB seagate is ~$210.
I don't know the pricing on LTO or DLT.
Though good old DAT isn't such a bad alternative at the low end of the
scale.
Tape is a linear media and as such is very fast to write to.
Typically much faster than disk..
> 
> IDE is also bulkier, and isn't as drop resistant as a tape :)
Some tape technology is not so robust though tape certainly weighs in at
a lot less than disk!!!

Imagine an environent where you are running a large scale archive with
70+Tb of data archived so far. You have a policy of write to two media
with one going off site. Without barcodes and robots to load and unload
the tapes you'd be in trouble.. One maybe.. I still shudder to think of
one of the carbon fibre robot arms wizzing around with a hard drive on
the end of it instead of a tape!!!

Imagine if it let go!
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 email: j.stern at bom.gov.au john.stern at computer.org
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  John Stern, High Performance Computing and Communication Centre
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