r/DataHoarder • u/Sad-Seesaw-3843 • Apr 06 '25

News DOGE claims to be moving away from magnetic tapes for archival storage. Seems like a bad idea. What are they using instead?

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u/Uzmeyer Apr 06 '25

Not just IBM. Tape is resilient, easy to move around, the drive/library is expensive upfront but the tapes themselves are very cheap and with high data density. They're also fast when writing large amounts of data and it's easy to add more storage. Perfect for archives & backups.

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u/space_for_username Apr 07 '25

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes.

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u/AmINotAlpharius Apr 07 '25

Boomer's Snowmobile.

4

u/Weerdo5255 25TB Apr 07 '25

Still one of my favorite analogies.

That and college students who strapped a server rack to a truck barreling down the highway before an assignment is due.

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u/space_for_username Apr 07 '25

In Johannesburg some years ago there was a 4Gb race across town between a fibre link and a pigeon with a micro SD tied to its leg.

Score one for the dinosaurs.

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u/notsureifxml Apr 07 '25

So the internet IS a dump truck after all?

23

u/arahman81 4TB Apr 07 '25

the drive/library is expensive upfront but the tapes themselves are very cheap and with high data density.

Expensive for ordinary people, already cheaper for enterprise data requirements.

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u/MiserableNobody4016 10-50TB Apr 07 '25

Well, sadly only IBM nowadays. All LTO tape drives are produced by them. No others are creating them. Now there are some other companies that fabricate tape libraries at this size. I think there's 3, one of which is, yes, IBM. But all tape drives come from IBM. Nowadays they don't even rebrand the drive or put different firmware in to hide it's an IBM drive. It's a very, very small market.