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by throw0101a 1044 days ago
> People invest in tape because it offers long term offsite storage, but vendors only offer drive life spans in the order of 4-6 years.

The exact same thing can be said of other storage technologies (HDD, SSD, etc).

Do you know why they do it? Because more bits keep getting created and no one is throwing away the previous bits, so they just keeping stacking up on each other.
1 comments
dabiged 1044 days ago
SATA was released in 2000. You can still buy new drives or motherboards with connectors. NTFS was released in 1993. You can still use it with off the shelf operating systems.

If I have an NTFS formatted SATA drive from 2002 I can plug it into a brand new machine and it will work out of the box (except it won't because it would have been dropped)

LTO6 was released in 2013 and is end of life. I cannot buy a new drive to read it. Storagetek T10000D was released in 2013. It is near impossible to find drives to read them. IBM TS1140 was released in 2014. Again all the tape hardware is EOL.

My point was: why is it that a media designed for long term storage, doesn't have long term support. If you want more uptake of tape, support the hardware for as long as you claim the tapes last.

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