Long-term data backup is something we don’t think about often, but it’s extremely important for future reuse of footage and data. Is LTO-tape an affordable and long-lasting alternative to HDDs in the near future? Most people store their work on HDDs hard drive disks, which turn with 5400 or 7200 revolutions per minute. But things in motion have a high likelihood of getting damaged by either friction or sudden movement. While a SSD has a pretty fixed lifespan of around 3,000 to 100,000 writing operations or 60 to 150 TBW (terrabytes written), an HDD could theoretically last forever, but usually fails after about ten years, and with the right (or wrong) handling can break in the first two minutes. Backups can’t fully save us of these digital tragedies, and even cloud storage is fragile, as you can see when Europe’s largest cloud provider OVHcloud’s data center SBG2 burns down. So how can we save our sacred digital property for as long as possible? That’s where an old technology comes back into play: tapes. While we think of MiniDV and VHS tapes, magnetic tape can be much more than that. LTO stands for Linear Tape Open and is a standard developed by Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM, and Quantum for half-inch tape cartridges, with the current generation being LTO-8, and LTO-9 planned for the end of this year. LTO-8 can store 12TB natively and up to 30TB compressed, LTO-9 goes even further with 18TB native and 45TB compressed storage capacity. Don’t get...
Published By: CineD - Friday, 18 June, 2021