It depends on the generation. Older tapes and drives are a lot cheaper, especially second hand but hold less (tapes aren’t meant to be overwritten a lot though so typically you want unused. New old stock or new).
Most homelabbers use LTO-6 or 5, and you can also upgrade your drive and still read your old tapes (except for the newest generations iirc)
I haven’t looked at a process comparison for years, so I’m going off pre AI numbers. It was cheaper then spinning rust back then for $/TB (for my setup it was cheaper than rust by a massive margin since it have a quarter petabyte of storage. Amortizing a tape drive over that many tapes gets cheap quickly), but maybe its different now?
Zetta@mander.xyz 3 weeks ago
Where in the world are you finding a 14tb drive for that price that isn’t used.
Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe 2 weeks ago
I’m not - that’s a used price.
I don’t have a problem with used - all my drives are used, and they typically last 5-10 years. I have some drives from 2010 that are still running.
New drives fail too, so relying on drives being new to prevent failures is foolish. The only defense against failures is duplication (which 3-2-1 backup falls under).
Whats just as important is to use a file system that can detect and repair data errors (such as ZFS).