[castratikron]

You are correct in that hard drives are still an order of magnitude cheaper per unit of storage than solid state drives. Then again, tape drives are still an order of magnitude cheaper per unit storage than hard drives. When was the last time you saw a tape drive?

[Taek]

The tape industry is still billions of dollars per year. Enterprises still buy tape all the time, and tape technology is still iterating.

And tape is not even that competitve. It's like 1/3 the cost of HDDs, and has an 80 second seek time, making it completely unusable for most real time applications (still usable for theatrical movies).

[ams6110]

Tapes are still used for enterprise backup, and for hierarchical storage systems (e.g. hot data on SSD, warm data on HDD, cold data migrates to tape eventually).

[tim333]

>tape drives are still an order of magnitude cheaper

Are they though? I just searched on Amazon and the cheapest LTO6 drive was $1,619.56.

Even just the tapes are $25 or so for "(2.5TB) native to (6.25TB) compressed" whatever that means which I guess is cheaper per TB if you don't worry about the drive.

https://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Ultrium-6-Drive-Height-Intern...

https://www.amazon.com/Sony-Linear-0-85-Inch-Internal-LTX250...

[nine_k]

Where do you think Amazon Glacier data are stored?

There's no point storing that on a high-IOPS, always-on medium, like an SSD or even HDD.

Tapes are big, and still make complete sense for backup purposes, especially if you want to maintain latest 10-15 backup copies to choose from.

[colek421]

Not likely tape. Looks like evidence points to BXDL

https://storagemojo.com/2014/04/25/amazons-glacier-secret-bd...

[germinalphrase]

The film industry commonly uses tapes for digital storage of their media. I've been told (but don't know this myself) that government uses tape for long term data storage as well.

[Keyframe]

I'm in film industry. Everything is baked onto LTO tapes. Everything. Three copies, three locations for backup. Always.

[Tsiklon]

... under my desk.

[hyperbovine]

Two days ago, when I toured a datacenter.