LTO-5 & 6 vs. hdd real world user survey

[lonewolf2koc@hotmail.com]

Anybody used LTO-5 or LTO-6 tape drive as final archive medium over hdd and would like to share their reliability for the past 5 years?

I have a few of the older 1 Tb hdds won't spin up. I was told that hdds require to be powered constantly or has to be refreshed every 6-12 months to avoid demagnetization and dried up lubrication. This is a very serious issue as the data I have are priceless. Was lucky to backup to 2 hdds. Now it appears that every year or I so I have to perform a full verified copy to another new hdd to avoid any data loss. But that process is quite tedious and costs a lot in utility and labor. When there's over 400 hdds to be refreshed, it gets pretty tedious.

 

[egproductions]

I've looked into LTO archival solutions but haven't actually used them but in general tape is a much more reliable archive solution than hard drives. That being said, I archive to 2 physical hard drives and once I fill up a pair of hard drives I hang on to one and the other I store in a separate physical location in case of theft/fire etc.

The reason I didn't end up going the LTO route is simply because I don't currently produce enough work to make the investment of an LTO drive worthwhile. If you backup enough data it ends up paying for itself because the tapes are cheaper than hard drives but every now and then you will want to upgrade the drive itself so you have to consider how often that is and how many Terabytes of Data you plan on backing up in that time period.

 

[lonewolf2koc@hotmail.com]

Thanks for the feed back. Good to hear real-world scenarios.

Further analysis:

LTO-6 uncompressed maxes out at 2.5 Tb. Can't rely on compressed estimate as video files are just hard to compress it further. 2.5 Tb is just a bit too small for 3-4 Tbs single hdds now on the market. I shoot a lot of P2 AVC-I 100 and Red Raw formats. They eats up space very fast. $2.5K tape drive+SAS controller to get it working is not cheap. Archiving to 2 hdds workout fairly well. Had several close calls. But never had 2 hdds of the same content gone bad. The instant access and flexibility of 3-4 Tb hdds make it very hard to go to other medium. Just have to put the effort to refresh the drive every year or so or simply do a verified copied to the bigger capacity hdd when it's available. That method seems to workout well when back in 2004-2006, 500 Gbs were plenty. Migrating it to 1 Tb fr. the 500 Gbs were error free. I'd need to acquire heavy 1080p content similar to that of TV station to make LTO-6 a worthwhile investment.

What I heard is that the hd mfgs already have the technology to make up to 20 Tb/drive within the next decade. Tape is still trailing behind. By then, LTO 10-12 should catch up. The cost LTO-6 media @$120/tape is still not cheap enough. If it's $50-60, then definite consideration. But @$120/LTO-6, I rather get two 2 Tb hdds for ~$180. However, there's hidden costs of having to manually refresh the hdds every year or so. If I sum all of the scenarios (time and electricity usage for fully verified byte by byte copy on the hdds), tape may be slightly cheaper. Therefore tape is not a bad long-term, high data volume consideration after all. I can archive to a single hdd and the other is on LTO-6 tape.