Linear Tape Open Storage (LTO): Game Changer in Data Storage

Hello guys,

Let me ask you this question: If you wanted to store a ton of data and archive it for a long time, how would you do it? Would you put it in a big hard drive and just put it on a shelf somewhere and expect it to last?

That's not actually the best way, you might be surprised to hear that the best archiving solution is actually tapes.

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[LTO-2 cartridge Wikipedia]}

Tapes are still a technology that is used today specifically referring to these types of drives and tapes called ”Linear Tape Open Drives (LTO)”.

What's Linear Tape Open Drives (LTO)?

Linear Tape Open (LTO) Ultrium is a high-capacity, single-reel tape storage solution developed and continually enhanced by Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM and Quantum and promoted by the LTO Program. It’s a powerful, scalable and adaptable tape format that helps address the growing demands of data protection. It’s also an open format, licensed by some of the most prominent names in the storage industry to ensure a broad range of compatible tape drives and cartridges.
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These tapes are specifically designed for archiving and they can actually hold a ton of data. The technology is called "Ultrium", which is the original version released in 2000. Some of its versions are LTO-5 and LTO-6 and these tapes can hold up to 1.5 and 2.5 terabytes of data respectively, however you can also compress the data so that they can hold 3 and 6 terabytes on a tape although there are the latest versions like LTO-7 and LTO-8 that can store up to 15 and 30 terabytes of data respectively.

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[LTO-7 cartridge alignment thebroadcastbridge.com]}

The interesting part it that is that these tapes are way cheaper than a hard drive. You can get LTO-6 tapes under $100 and you know how much it would cost you to get a 6 terabyte hard drive.

Benefits

Obviously, this is really good for storing a lot of data and it's actually way better for archiving because tapes lasts way longer than hard drives. You might be surprised to hear that even if you take a hard drive, unplug it and put it on a shelf, it's not going to last very long, it probably won't last 10 years. If you try and boot up after 10 years, it probably isn’t going to work, so all that data is going to be lost. However, a tape will last 15 to 30 years, so it's way better for archiving.

You're probably wondering why don't we just use tapes for everything except hard drives.

Tapes are linear, you can't have random access. If you want to load a file on a tape, it has to search through and get to that part and then load it. It's all linear, it's not like a hard drive that can access any part of the disk at any one time so it's going to be slower to read random files.

The drives, not the tapes themselves but the drives to read them are extremely expensive. It costs several thousands of dollars, this is worth it if you run a film production studio for example and you're archiving tons of tons of data and video and you need a lot of storage to last for a long time.

Tapes are actually significantly cheaper per gigabyte than a hard drive, you might pay twice the amount for a hard drive the same size as a tape. For me, it's really not worth it because I would have to pay at least $1,500 for a drive and then $50 for each tape.

If you run a film company and you wanted to keep all that data for some reason, you want to store it for long term then tapes are probably a pretty good investment if you're wanting to store hundreds of terabytes.

Conclusion

I think the most surprising thing to me is that I really didn't know these existed and I'm sure you probably haven't either, Did you know that tapes are used to store data? I didn't, I thought tapes are cassettes and they're all gone but nope, they are actually used today and they're coming out of new generations all the time.

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[LTO Ultrium generation road map lto.org]}

Have you’ve heard of this before? What do you think of these tapes? Are you surprised that these are probably better for long-term storage than a hard drive? Reply this post, share your thoughts and don’t forget to smash that upvote button.

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References: 1 - 2

Image sources: 1 - 2 - 3

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_{GIF made by @foundation}

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Thanks to @camzy & @samstickkz for this amazing toon.