- Shiny disks should kill dull magnetic tape once and for all
- But cheap storage almost killed the media for data sahamsters
- Tape is still the only true viable long -term solution but drives are too expensive
It’s 2025 and after nearly 20 years, It has Sony announced That it finishes Blu-ray media production as well as minidiscs, minidiscs data and minidv ribbon a few months after it got rid of its 5.5TB Optical Disc Archive cartridge.
I will be quick to say that this is almost certainly for empty media as opposed to pressed media (as in 4K Bluray movies and console games), as streaming, for all its convenience, doesn’t quite match physical media when it comes to quality and convenience.
There are still plenty of Blu-ray mediator providers all around; A quick look at Amazon brings well-known names like Verbatim, SmartBuy, Ridata Frem, but I think the script is on the wall for Blu-ray with dwindling demand and the front of alternative storage (external hard drives, portable hard drives, portable SSDs ). Shiny slices are done and dusty, without any visible heir to the throne (despite what we have written in the past).
In addition, the optical disk will deteriorate over time; the Canadian Conservation Institute estimates that BD-R has an average life of between 5 and 10 years old, which cannot be good news for those who have used writing-only blu-ray discs. In reality, it will largely depend on a lot of other factors such as humidity, heat, storage conditions, dye quality, etc.
As for the future of on-premise data storage, of the remaining candidates, tape is the one who is most likely to survive and thrive. Hard drives are good for low hundred terabytes, and the use of helium means that at some point in the future Helium-based HDDs will become useless. Western Digital says that helium “remains in the drive throughout its operating life”, which is usually between 5 and 10 years, about the same as Blu-ray.
A single 18TB LTO-9 cartridge sold for $ 88 can replace the 720 25GB Blu-ray disk, a bundle that costs $ 288 on Amazon
Désiré ATHOW
Solid-state storage is another, but it is still too expensive for something over double-digit TB security copies. Set aside exotic storage media such as glass, silica, ceramics, DNA and holography, there is only one tested and reliable media back on the market, the grandfather of them all, and: the old, venerable, but still very living tape, more specifically LTO (Linear Tape Open). Yes, precisely the technology that optical drives should eliminate.
The current generation, LTO-9, delivers 18 TB per LTO-10 bands that are expected to offer between 24 TB and 36 TB. Its roadmap, released in 2022, goes up to Gen 14 with a tape capacity of up to 576 TB (yes, it is more than half a petabyte). Ridiculous? Well, IBM and Fujifilm already demonstrated such a tape back in… 2020It’s over four years ago.
LTO, used extensively for long -term cooling storage in data centers and businesses, has the support of some of the Largest technology companies in the world and therefore does not disappear for the time being. Tape comes with its inherent problems: Drive is expensive, and data stored on a band can only be accessed linearly. But on the other hand, LTO media is very cheap, less than $ 5 per day. TB, can be easily stored and is durable with a lifetime of up to 30 years.
What I think could cement the LTO status as the go-to-media for data seashs is an affordable LTO drive. Right now, the cheapest LTO-9 internal drive costs more than $ 4,300 and is not compatible with most workstations because it uses SAS (Serial-Atached SCSI) as a physical interface. Adding an external cabinet bumps the price to just over $ 5,000. We reported an LTO-9 drive from OWC back in 2022.
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The hope of a $ 999 LTO-10 band station
Could a drive of less than $ 1,000 change market dynamics? No, I don’t think so. Large data collectors, those who require storage space worth hundreds of TB, is a small minority that will almost certainly have financial influence (or/and incentive/contacts) to buy an LTO-8 or 9 drive ( or an autoloader) if they wish. to. So yes, even though I would love to have a $ 999 HPE external LTO-10 drive to use, it has absolutely no chance of happening.
Affordable cloud storage in the low terabyte circuit is the main reason why the overall addressable market for low cost on-premise backup has shrunk so much. Blame blame on likes Backblaze (Unlimited, $ 72/year for one computer), Idrive (10 TB, $ 99.50/year), Internxt (5TB, $ 380 for life). There is even Geyser dataA Cloud Storage Service powered by Tape (alias tapas) at the low, low price of $ 1.55 per day. TB per month (100TB would cost $ 1,860 per year).
However, cloud storage should supplement rather than replace on-premise storage as part of a comprehensive backup strategy; Just remember that upload/download performance will never match an on-prems solution, and for something bigger than 10 TB, prices will rise rapidly if you are planning the next decade.
