Reply to post: Re: Lowest-cost archive medium

No TKO for LTO: Tape format spawns another 2 generations, sports 120TB bigness

Riku

Re: Lowest-cost archive medium

There is, it's called DAT. problem is, most *consumers* say things like "USB sticks are cheaper than that. yes, they are, and good luck to you getting your data back in five years from one that was a freebie at a trade-show. "Prosumers", maybe they will buy something like a DAT drive. probelm is today, DAT is no longer being scaled by HP and LTO's underlying technology is just too expensive to send the older generations downmarket. (Those LTO tape heads cost a fortune to manufacture).

Consumers want the same features (in this case the reliability, durability and low likelihood of bad bits), but they don't_want_to_pay_for_it. End of story. Having worked in an R&D facility, despite what everyone thinks, this stuff does cause the scientists a lot of headaches and sleepless nights and does cost a lot of real, hard cash that has to be recouped. Consumers just don't want to admit that - a behaviour somewhat akin to El Reg's "freetards".

Enterprise-class features *may* eventually get cheaper, but in order to do that, they have to acheive scale and some healthy competiton helps too. With some very cool technolgies, thus doesn't always occur.

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