I missed your reply, Chris. I think we are talking about different things. I'll try to clarify.
LTO is designed with future support specifically in mind because it was designed to solve this particular archive problem. HDDs are not at all designed with this in mind.
No, they are not. If they were, and the people making them were that convinced, they would offer longevity in writing. They don't. Please show me one independent study of LTO that proves its longevity for archival purposes.
Yes. Insurance payout.
This category of enterprise storage is out of scope, it's very expensive. An LTO-5 drive is cheap in comparison to that. You can consider it a kind of insurance compared to using high density consumer hard drives as an archive media.
Why not insure consumer hard drives at a higher premium? Which is cheaper? If LTOs need to be insured to maintain their value, what is their value? And if only the most expensive can insure, what about those who can't? Is it cost that prohibits them?
You're ascribing a meaningful cost to using the hardware in a manner for which it's not designed. If you have a case where you need to be sifting through tape for one file to restore, you either have a bad design, or you had an edge case. If it's an edge case it does not need to be quantified and monetized.
I don't understand. One is always sifting through tape, and that's the very nature of tape. The inherent disadvantages of tape will remain, no matter what. And if anybody has to pay for it, it is a meaningful cost, and something that every investor has to consider. How can you say it's an edge case? It can happen to anybody. It's like saying accidents are an edge case, so why insure?
Right except a bad hot swap, bad shutdown, or bad mount, resulting in a corrupted file system. You cannot make a hard drive fool proof read only. It can write garbage.
Everything that can happen to tape as well.
Why? They aren't the same thing. The use cases are totally different.
You're the one who compared it to NTFS. I just pointed out more robust file systems, especially ZFS which is very popular for NAS.
Not significantly ahead of what? HDDs which aren't even archival? In the context of this thread, which is an archival context, HDD's simply do not qualify.
Neither does LTO.
So yes LTO is significanty ahead in this area. You can't even get a hard drive with a UER as low as LTO is. And you don't get the workflow with HDD that is implicit in LTO.
That's just LTO marketing rehashed. Billions of people have perfectly fine workflows, of every magnitude imaginable, without even knowing about LTO. And, to repeat your last sentence with roles reversed: You don't get the workflow with LTO that is implicit in HDD.
Now, if you have a small library, then indeed LTO may not make as much cost sense. But there is still a need to reduce the likelihood of data loss (incuding corruption) and that starts with not using high density consumer SATA drives if you care about your data.
LTO data can be lost forever, too. So, if I really cared about my data, I'll just make more backups with hard drives. I don't see any flaw in this reasoning.
What you're saying, is like saying Linux does not guarantee its own survival therefore you shouldn't use it for anything. It's ridiculous.
Linux is free, LTO isn't. Linux does not claim archival. Big difference. Equating the two is ridiculous. Archival means it has to guarantee its own survival. Isn't that what you have been arguing all along?
You're arguing against LTO because of an unknown that also applies to hard drives, yet you advocate hard drives over LTO. It's weird advice.
No, it's only weird if you don't value money. If you value money, when two things offer the same value proposition, choose the cheaper one. It's common sense. Since when has that become weird?
And in fact wrong because LTO is designed by the LTO consortium to survive as an archiving platform. SNIA is not doing that for hard drives. They are thinking in 5 year terms, whereas LTO is thinking in 25-50 year terms.
It's 30 years maximum, and that is not archival. And definitely not a viable technology if it is more expensive to maintain and use than 6 consumer grade drives over that same period.
If you can offer better odds over any other, you should produce your process. LTO has done this.
Hard drives do. I offer better odds for hard drive duplication over LTO. Everyone's doing it.
First you said if the error rates were relevant then Google and Amazon would use LTO. Second you said they don't use LTO. Yet they do use LTO. But then you change your own metric for what makes such error rates relevant, and still conclude that LTO isn't actually meaningfully better than drives. This despite the fact drives aren't designed with this in mind, but LTO is. It's pretty weird.
I was wrong about Google and Amazon. Regarding technical matters, I fully realize, and have stated earlier, that I am not qualified to go into the details of it. But if its concept is flawed, why waste time? LTO, for all its benefits, cannot prove its ability to archive.
I will reconsider LTO only if there is sufficient independent evidence of its longevity and ability to hold data over a 30 year period, guaranteed. It does not, and therefore its utility is limited. You're right, it is weird.
If you take someone's digital photo and encoded it as a cave painting, as soon as one fleck of paint came off the whole encoding would be destroyed and the photo lost to time.
It's funny, and weird as it may sound, you cannot prove your statement. You see, cave paintings have been around far longer than the language we are conversing in. I wouldn't be so hasty in my condescension.
In any case, I feel I am going overboard with this argument. I have deep reservations about LTO, which could turn out to be wrong. It wouldn't be the first time I've blundered, so I hope all this is taken in good humor.
Wish you a happy new year!