[isostatic]

> (Tape backup systems are _still_ for sale and in use...)

LTO seems to tick a lot of boxes in the archive business. I remember people trying to sell a MAID (massive array of idle disks) some years ago -- something like 100 disks in 4U of space. They came of blades that each held about 8 disks, and there were about 15 of them in a 4U row. With a controller in the middle it meant you could get somewhere in the region of 1000 disks in a rack.

The power consumption would be obscene, but that was fine, as the disks were kept idle, in fact the system could only power about 25% of the disks at once. The idea was you don't need access to the majority of files, and a 10 second latency when you do isn't going to hurt (far faster than tape)

At the same time tape manufacturers were pushing LTO-5 and LTFS, arguing that was the better solution for archive, and after a misstep with LTO6 (launching at 2.5T rather than 3T), LTO7 recovered.

[discodave]

MAID is rumoured to be how AWW Glacier works.