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this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2023
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Haven't hard drives been cheaper per storage amount than SSDs forever? The problem was always that they were slow. I think tape may still be cheaper per storage amount than hard drives, but the speed is abysmal.
Edit: yeah looks like tape is 3x to 4x cheaper than hard drives https://corodata.com/tape-backups-still-used-today
Tape will be around until something better for archival purposes comes around
It lasts significantly longer sitting on the shelf than HDD or SSD by far
I doubt it’s being used for anything other than backups and archiving though
It's also used for sending huge amounts of data long distances. "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway." That's usually attributed to Andrew S. Tanenbaum, but wikipedia follows that with "other alleged speakers include..." so take that with a grain of salt. They do note that the first problem in his book on computer networks asks students to calculate the throughput of a Saint Bernard carrying floppy disks.
Do we assume the Saint Bernard is spherical and ignores air resistance?
No, it's for real. The bandwidth of sending a truckload of disks to a destination can get to literally Tbps speeds. Latency is a different problem
Oh, I'm aware. Just making a tongue in cheek physics joke since they said he put that problem in a textbook.
Amazon is using trucks to ship hard drives for the largest data transfers. It's more efficient than doing it over internet. They also offer a service where they will put the data you want in a drive, mail it to you, and after you're done, you send the drive back.
https://aws.amazon.com/snowball/
Microsoft Azure Data Box Disk is also available.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/databox/data-box-disk-overview