Interesting info about the LTO tapes and its amazing that OS dont support them anymore, or the SCSI ones anymore, You can buy USB tape drives now but cost a few thousand...........
When the subject of “optical” or “recordable media” comes up, you often hear people mention such terms as “shelf life” or “ruggedness” of the physical media (which is, in the case of optical disc, an actual DISC).
When it comes to shelf life of an LTO tape, we can tell you that it’s one of the best archival choices available today mainly because of its shelf life of 30 to 50 years…coupled with a relatively low cost of ownership.
- Hard drives last one to five years
- DVD's last three to seven years
- Flash drives last five to eight years
- LTO lasts 30 to 50 years
With the current generation of LTO Ultrium, LTO-7 able to hold 6TB native and 15TB Compressed on a single cartridge. In the world of video and film production – something we know a little about –
digital tape storage has become a viable and cost-effective alternative to hard drives for the long-term storage of video productions and other digital content…at least where hundreds of terabytes are concerned. The technology is stable, long-standing and doesn’t require any significant learning curve to understand or use – a win-win for business owners and film producers alike.
With hard drives becoming more expensive to purchase courtesy of the “pleasure” of having to buy more and more of them – to say nothing of their maintenance against hazards – the choice of going with digital tape or LTO has surfaced as a means for archiving video for storage, be it short or long-term. Taking all this into consideration, it’s no surprise LTO is in heavy rotation for data archiving and storage due to the inherent strengths and low cost…but it’s also being used by those producing video because the cost allows for just about anyone to create a competent backup and archiving system for their video. With improvements to the technology including LTFS – also known as “Tape NAS” which describes a hybrid fusion of the best features of LTO and the direct access search capabilities of hard drives.