
Kind of sad.
People keep banging on about a tapeless world but you try stuffing someone else flash drive into that incompatible hole.
Still a few players left.
Time to stock up I guess.
Japan's TDK Corporation has seen the writing on the wall and decided to get out of the LTO tape media manufacturing business. The company's statement says: "In recent years, however, the data storage market has been contracting, creating a difficult business environment … TDK has decided to withdraw from the data tape business …
You're right, TDK tapes were THE standard, moreover the quality was always consistent (although the Chinese stuff was of a lower grade).
It's sad to see TDK tapes go but I'm not surprised. In fact, TDK has lasted longer than I expected. I guessed it'd would go a few years back when VHS tapes dropped in price to only a few dollars for a pack of three, that was also about the time I bought my last tape. I'm now recycling old tapes, that is whenever I use the VHS, which, these days, is pretty rarely.
Reckon my usage is typical, so it's little wonder it's goodbye time.
There are several benefits of tape but the most important is portability. Yes, in the volumes that some companies use, it's not portable in the pick-it-up-on-the-way-out sense, but from a legal point of view, tape is far more portable than storing all you backups in a cloud service consisting of thousands of spindles distributed across multiple physical locations.
While it's possible to overcome the issues with, say, cloud backups by throwing money at it for larger pipes, etc... no amount of money with make those solutions portable in the same way tape is - especially in smaller quantities.
It's also good from a records management point of view. All the legal firms I deal with still maintain an archiving system based around bits of paper arranged in vertical files, shuttled about in archive boxes. The beauty of that system is that (with proper management), records are stored out of sight, out of mind at a specialised, offsite location and destroyed once the retention period has elapsed. Tape has similar benefits.
Only yesterday I was telling people that tape still has a bright future. The amount of data you can fit in a rack is on a par with hard discs, but the discs wear out faster, and cost £thousands more per year to spin and to cool. Even "backup to the cloud" still has to land on something, and if it's hard disc it's a waste of power and space.
I still believe in tape. And whilst I can see it moving out of individual companies to cloud backup providers in time, I still can't see it going away anytime soon.
I assume you mean for archiving, not live storage. If tapes spin as long as drives, I would expect failure rates to be extreme. Access times on linear data storage devices like tape suck balls.
We use tapes for archiving, not live storage. You can't compare tapes to hard drives for that. They (should) perform different functions.
For our archiving we have a copy to tape, restored to a drive for verification. The drive is then stored on-site for fast access. LTOs are stored in a warehouse (and really old drives). Tapes are emergency storage, should a drive fail.
Mind you, this is for video production, so the drives are important to us in order to reduce the time necessary to get at data we have needed to remove from mass storage quickly. Tapes are just insurance.
"Tapes are just insurance." - you got it right there. I don't expect to do regular restores from tape. Whenever possible I advise clients to have D2D backups at file level. Tape is an invaluable DR tool, though, and also excellent for archiving. I treat tape as the deep-tank. The backstop for when things go badly wrong. And it's served me well over the years.
It's not for constant access - hard discs are miles better at that. But users need to have reasonable expectations on access times to effectively unused data too.
"That leaves just four manufacturers, with Fujifilm having the leading market share and loss-making Imation effectively reselling TDK cartridges"
This also begs the question when Fujifilm does the same as Kodak and kills off most of its film. A few years ago Kodak killed off Kodachrome then it wasn't long before the company was bankrupt--not that killing Kodachrome was the case, rather it's symptomatic of the changing market.
I can remember how tapes improved over time and much of it was down to TDK using excellent binders, to refining the polishing techniques and increasing the number of polishing stages (if I recall correctly, TDK eventually ended up using a 5-stage process for their good quality tapes).
One can only hope TDK sells its plant, polishers etc., to some enterprising Chinese company that will keep tape manufacturing going a little longer. Even so, I reckon it will be only delaying the inevitable for tape manufacture (eventually it'll end up going the same way as when Technicolor sold its imbibition (dye-transfer) plant to the Chinese. That still-unequaled film process lasted a few more years but the writing was on the wall.)