It’s one of many nice mysteries of computing, how in some way within the Yr Of OLlama 2026, tape stays the god of low cost storage. Some time again [Ben Pettis] recounted his expertise organising an LTO-5 tape drive in his homelab, an expertise which solely turns into extra related as exhausting drive costs keep excessive.
LTO-5 is already effectively old-fashioned within the skilled world, in spite of everything– a brand new server set up could be debating the deserves of LTO-9 versus LTO-10, however for the homelab it’s a matter of what’s reasonably priced on the used market with decently-sized cartridges. When you can reside with 1.5 TB of uncompressed knowledge on a roughly palm-sized Linear Tape, Open cartridge then LTO-5 may very well be ok. Sure, the tapes are advertized as 3GB, however that’s assuming a 2:1 compression ratio on the information, which you’re not more likely to get on the pictures and video that make up a lot of an information horder’s storage. That’s one factor [Ben] was fast to clear up for us. He additionally detailed his adventures with the cheaper-to-buy fiber channel mannequin of drive.
Tape drives often include an SAS or fiber channel interface– fiber channel being, you guessed it, an optical resolution in contrast to the SCSI-like SAS connection chances are you’ll be accustomed to for block storage units. With a PCIe adapter it’s not exhausting to arrange, offered you get the cables the suitable approach round! That’s one other element we’re glad [Ben] shared so we will discover it once more if we’ve got the identical drawback: with no swap within the circuit, you want a crossover cable to convey TX to RX. Which is apparent looking back, however obscure to these of us simply studying about the usual.
The benefit, as [Ben] makes clear and everybody has at all times recognized is just value. As of this writing, diskprices.com has 16$/TB because the lowest price, whereas [Ben] was in a position to decide up lightly-used tapes on eBay for less than 2$/TB. If in case you have a number of knowledge, these financial savings amortize the drive prices comparatively shortly, since a used drive like [Ben]’s will be had for just a few hundred bucks.
Is it the last word resolution for our knowledge storage woes? That is dependent upon your wants, however maybe not contemplating we get as many recommendations on storing knowledge on reel-to-reel as we do on LTO. We even noticed a tape-loading robotic repurposed to serve bar one time.
