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## Alternatives considered
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<!-- include benchmarks and procedure if relevant -->
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### Tape medium
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Last I (anarcat) checked, the latest (published) LTO tape standard
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stored a whopping 18TB of data, uncompressed, per cartridge and writes
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400MB/s which means it takes 12h30m to fill up one tape.
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LTO tapes are pretty cheap, e.g. [here is a 12TB LTO8 tape from Fuji
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for 80$CAD](https://www.newegg.ca/p/12K-00EM-00011). The LTO tape *drives* are however prohibitively
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expensive. For example, an "[upgrade kit](https://www.newegg.ca/hp-q6q68a-lto-ultrium-7-lto-ultrium-8/p/1HZ-00DX-00040)" for an HP tape library
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sells for a whopping 7k$CAD here. I can't actually find any LTO-8 tape
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drives on newegg.ca.
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As a comparison, you can get a [18TB Seagate IronWolf drive for
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410$CAD](https://www.newegg.ca/seagate-st18000ne000-18tb/p/N82E16822184872 ), which means for the price of that upgrade kit you can get
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a whopping 300TB worth of HDDs for the price of the *tape drive*. And
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you don't have any actual tape yet, you'd need to shell out another
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2k$CAD to get 300TB of 12TB tapes.
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(Of course, that abstracts away the cost of running those hard
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drives. You might dodge that issue by pretending you can use HDD
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"trays" and hot-swap those drives around though, since that is
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effectively how tapes work. So maybe for the cost of that 2k$ of
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tapes, you could buy a 4U server with a bunch of slots for the hard
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drive, which you would *still* need to do to host the tape drive
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anyway.) |