The challenge of keeping data safe and accessible will probably never truly end. It seems that every medium has some major caveats when it comes to cold storage, but if you spend some time researching the problem, one format keeps coming up: tape.
This might sound weird given that the tape media we know, like cassettes or VHS, are pretty fragile and prone to degrading, but if we’re talking about Linear Tape-Open (LTO) you’re looking at a (ideal) lifespan up to 30 years, and a cost per terabyte that’s significantly cheaper than SSDs or hard drives. So why isn’t everyone on the LTO train?
The dream of near-limitless storage cheap storage
Everyone loves a cheap byte
The latest LTO-10 generation of tape can store up to 40TB natively, and up to 100TB with compression. This is the latest generation of LTO, so it’s still relatively expensive per tape. You’re looking at around $500 per tape, which works out to roughly $5 a terabyte if you get the full benefit of compression. Even just looking at native capacity, you’re looking at $12.50 per TB.
Compare that to something like a $900 Seagate IronWolf Pro enterprise hard drive at about $28 per TB, and you can see the allure for archival purposes.
Tape is still the backbone of the cloud
You’ve probably used it without knowing
You might be surprised to know that we are into the 10th generation of advanced enterprise tape storage. It feels like it should be obsolete, making us think of ZX Spectrum cassettes and reel-to-reel mainframe data storage, but the truth is that tape storage is still an important part of the storage mix in data centers.
Big data centers use tape storage for data that’s accessed infrequently, and to make safe offline backups that are immune to hackers and malware. Far from being obsolete or old-fashioned, it’s crucial.
Quiz
Storage Through the Ages
From ancient clay tablets to modern SSDs — how much do you really know about the wild history and quirky facts of data storage?
HistoryHardwareCapacityOdditiesModern Tech
What was the storage capacity of the very first commercially sold hard disk drive, IBM’s 350 RAMAC introduced in 1956?
Correct! The IBM 350 RAMAC stored a whopping 5 megabytes — and weighed over a ton. It was the size of two refrigerators and leased for around $3,200 per month, which is roughly $35,000 in today’s money.
Not quite. The IBM 350 RAMAC, launched in 1956, stored just 5 megabytes of data. Despite that tiny capacity by modern standards, it was a revolutionary machine that filled an entire room and cost thousands per month to lease.
Which of these has genuinely been used as a data storage medium by researchers and engineers?
Correct! DNA storage is a real and rapidly advancing field. Researchers have successfully encoded entire books, images, and even operating systems into synthetic DNA strands, which can theoretically store 215 petabytes per gram of material.
Not quite. The answer is DNA molecules. Scientists have encoded movies, books, and even malware into synthetic DNA strands. DNA storage is extraordinarily dense — theoretically capable of holding 215 petabytes per gram — making it one of the most promising future storage technologies.
What does the ‘SSD’ in SSD storage stand for?
Correct! SSD stands for Solid State Drive. The ‘solid state’ refers to the fact that it uses solid-state electronics — NAND flash memory chips — with no moving mechanical parts, unlike traditional spinning hard disk drives.
Not quite. SSD stands for Solid State Drive. The term ‘solid state’ comes from electronics jargon meaning the device uses semiconductor components rather than moving mechanical parts, which is why SSDs are faster, quieter, and more durable than HDDs.
Approximately how many standard 1.44 MB floppy disks would you need to match the storage of a single modern 1 terabyte hard drive?
Correct! One terabyte equals roughly 1,048,576 megabytes, and dividing by 1.44 MB per floppy gives you about 728,000 disks. Stacked, that pile would be taller than most skyscrapers — a humbling reminder of how far storage has come.
Not quite. You’d need approximately 700,000 floppy disks to match a single 1 TB drive. That stack of disks would reach over a mile high if laid flat, which is a staggering way to visualize the enormous leap in storage density over just a few decades.
What storage medium did NASA use to store data from the original Apollo moon missions in the 1960s and 1970s?
Correct! NASA relied heavily on magnetic tape reels during the Apollo era. In fact, thousands of original Apollo-era data tapes were eventually lost or accidentally erased and reused, leading to a massive archival effort years later to recover what footage remained.
Not quite. NASA used magnetic tape reels to store Apollo mission data. Tragically, many of these original tapes were later lost or even deliberately erased and reused due to tape shortages, which is why some original high-quality Apollo footage is gone forever.
What is the name of the technique used in modern NAND flash storage that stores multiple bits per cell to increase density?
Correct! QLC, or Quad-Level Cell, stores 4 bits per cell and is used in high-capacity, budget-friendly SSDs. While it offers great density and lower cost, QLC NAND typically has lower endurance and slower write speeds compared to TLC (3-bit) or MLC (2-bit) designs.
Not quite. QLC stands for Quad-Level Cell, and it’s a real NAND flash technology that stores four bits per cell. It allows for very high storage densities at lower cost, but trades off endurance and write performance compared to older, less dense cell types like MLC or SLC.
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway stores seeds for agricultural preservation — but what famous tech company also operates a nearby ‘Arctic Code Vault’ to preserve software?
Correct! GitHub operates the Arctic Code Vault in Svalbard, Norway, where they stored a snapshot of all active public repositories on film designed to last 1,000 years. The project is part of GitHub’s Arctic Vault Program to preserve open-source software for future generations.
Not quite. It’s GitHub — owned by Microsoft — that runs the Arctic Code Vault. In February 2020, they photographed every active public repository onto special archival film and stored it deep within a decommissioned coal mine in Svalbard, designed to last a thousand years.
What was the primary reason early floppy disks were called ‘floppy’?
Correct! Early floppy disks — especially the original 8-inch variety from IBM in 1971 — used a thin, genuinely flexible magnetic disk inside a soft protective sleeve. You could literally flop the thing around. Later 3.5-inch versions came in rigid plastic cases, but kept the ‘floppy’ name.
Not quite. The name ‘floppy’ came from the physical flexibility of the magnetic disk inside the sleeve. The original 8-inch IBM floppy disks introduced in 1971 had a noticeably limp, floppy disk that you could bend. Even the rigid-cased 3.5-inch disks that followed kept the iconic nickname.
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The drive cost kills the dream instantly
Talk about sticker shock!
While the tapes are relatively cheap on a per-terabyte basis, the actual tape drives are incredibly expensive. The previous generation of tape drives cost well over five grand and if you have to ask what the latest drive generation costs, you probably can’t afford it. For a data center, this hardware cost is negligible, because the volumes of data they need to store on tape quickly make the costs minuscule compared to hard drives and SSDs.
For a homelabber or someone looking for a long-term backup solution at home, well, it’s not in most people’s budgets! That said, if you go back to the 5th or 6th generation, we’re starting to look at hundreds instead of thousands of dollars per drive. Though, of course, the tape capacities plummet too, and you have to deal with the SAS connection standard, which isn’t meant for consumer computer technology.
Since you can buy a stack of large enterprise hard drives for the same money, the math just doesn’t work out yet for home users.
Tape changes how storage actually works
It’s a paradigm shift
Even if you got one of these LTO drives for home use, they don’t work quite the same way as other forms of storage. As a linear tape, you’re going to have long seek times and no random access to speak of. These drives offer good sequential read and write speeds, but you wouldn’t want to, for example, use one as a Plex drive. To store old movies that you’ve already watched but don’t want to lose? That’s a good use case, but for live access? You want a hard drive instead. While modern tapes can be mounted in a way that looks like a file system to a computer, the underlying hardware just isn’t suited to being accessed like the other storage we’re used to using.
As durable and long-lasting LTO cassettes are, they do wear out relatively quickly from reading and writing too. Even the latest generation only has an end-to-end “full pass” rating of a few hundred cycles. Also, if they’re going to be in cold storage for more than a month, you have to start looking at climate-controlled storage.
It only makes sense for a narrow use case (for now)
Tape excels in one very specific scenario: write once, read rarely. If you’re archiving footage, backing up massive datasets, or storing data you might not touch for years, it’s almost perfect.
For everything else, it falls apart. Everyday storage needs convenience, speed, and simplicity. These are areas where even cheap hard drives easily win. However, as home hosting and local data storage becomes more popular, there might be an incentive to create a version of this technology that doesn’t cost thousands of dollars, where the drives don’t have to stand up to data center levels of wear-and-tear. I don’t know if it will happen, but we can hope!
Stephan is the sports journalist for the Maple Grove Report.
