Re: Magnetic Drives?
I'm curious if you honestly feel like the future of backup destinations is in magnetic tape media. Although SSD prices are still higher, the prices are dropping very quickly
Honestly, I think the future of offline offsite backups is in tape and I think HDD's are toast except possibly as online onsite single backup copies to save the hassle of getting last nights tape. SSD's aren't going to be affordable enough for offline offsite backups for a LONG time.
The catalogue price for a single LTO6 tape is £30 for 3.25TB uncompressed capacity. All you need to is ask, and you can get about 20% off of that if you have an account manager and are buying any sensible number, but anyway.
SSD storage costs are not in that ballpark. To get to 3250GB you'd need an awful lot of individual drives. Basically your looking at about £1000 worth of SSD's for the same level of storage and most companies doing tape run a month series of tapes.
Yeah, the price of flash is falling and that's a lazy comparison of looking at a last generation tape (LTO6 is last gen, LTO7 is available with double the storage) versus multiplying the space of the cheapest consumer SSD's which you wouldn't do, but the prices are roughly indicative. Even if the price fell by a factor of ten, tape vendors would still be saying "SSD's are triple the price!"
And that ignores that there is a tape roadmap out to LTO10, with a native capacity of 48TB per tape which the tape vendors will be marching along while the SSD price falls which is probably going to widen the gap to continue making tape viable.
So for offsite offline backups, there is little competition. Online backups are another matter, but for the cost versus risk factor it's not worth not doing offline storage of company endingly critical data.