At least, if you believe some companies. Cache-A just announced new distribution agreements in Europe and Asia; and their main product is a tape drive. Or, as they’d rather put it, “archive solutions targeting the digital film and professional video industry”.
It’s a cool solution, basically offering a tape drive with built-in gigabit ethernet and a web/ftp server. This combines the large storage capacity of a tape drive with the ease-of-use of a web application; they also offer units with one or more hard drives for fast caching of the data on the tapes.
But the main storage medium is still a tape drive. They’re using LTO-4 tapes with a 800 GB capacity, and a price tag of around $50. The prices for LTO tapes have been pretty stable over the last year. That means tape-based solutions have two distinct advantages over disk-based storage:
- They are cheaper per gigabyte
- Tapes are more durable than hard drives
If trends continue however, I expect to see flash drives become more common for long-term storage. They are just as durable as tapes, and if prices keep falling by about 50% per year they’ll come down to the same price as tapes within a few years. Can you imagine the tape library below being replaced by a flash library?
Sun T7000 library
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