https://www.unitex.co.jp/en/products/hardware/lto/lto-tapedrive/

Found from a google, no experience with it.

Tape is not a nice medium for the self-hoster, the drives are expensive, the tapes need to be carefully stored securely (temperature and humidity controled). Its a lot of hassle. That said, if you find something good, I'm interested as well, so report back.

Its fun to think of alternate storage media. The other day I calculated that with the idiotic pricing now, HDDs are only slightly cheaper than DVD storage. And DVDs last longer and dont crash randomly, especially if you get long storage dvds.

Couple years ago, I got three DOA WD red nas HDDs. Dead. And 2 DOA Samsung ssds. I have zero trust for any drive now. No doubt theyre all cost cutting and going to shit. I have 20 year old drives that still work fine.

Ive never personally experienced disc rot even on 20 year old discs, but I heard people have. But yeah DVDs would obviously be a goofy mass backup solution.

I use LTO for my 70TB of data. My rig is done on the cheap. I got an LTO 5 drive external off ebay for around 500. SAS card and a really old cheap HP desktop for about 50. Works perfectly, I have done a full system restore from backups and the tapes are cheap. Have had this system working for 5 years now.

In the future i plan to upgrade to LTO 7 when the drives become cheaper, but I have found it to be very reliable, great for making my backups and just so cool and fun to use.

Just use a spinning rust drive for periodic backup.

Nothing you have is worth the cost of a LTO setup.

LTO tapes are 18TB today, raw - 48TB compressed.

How much data you got?

At that size I can probably build 2 Proxmox boxes with drives and compete very well on the costs.

A single 14TB disk is about $270 today - that's in the same realm as a tape.

But tape also requires a drive, and that gets pricey fast.

Can you just connect a regular drive using a USB SATA adapter or something?

I think that isn't really a thing. Usually you would have a tape drive in a backup server for a network, and the backup server would have its own HDD, so you'd back up over the network to the HDD and then dump HDD to tape locally at close to the transfer speed of the disk. Higher capacity tapes have fast transfer and if your data source can't kee up, the tape has to start and stop all the time, which slows everything down and wears everything out.

"Some TB's" = single digits? Probably just back up to remote storage if you have enough network speed.

If the tape drive attaches with SATA like a regular DVD drive or HDD then just get an adapter that connects USB to SATA. USB is unlikely to be a bottleneck with how slow tape is anyway, so having it internal isn't that important.

But tape drives are only worth it if you need a heck of a lot of cartridges or absolutely need 30 year storage rather than maybe 10 years for an offline physical hard drive (assuming they're both stored properly). Though I have drives decades old that still have readable data. But even if you copy out the data every 5-10 years to a new HDD, you're likely to spend less than just the tape drive itself. And drives get larger over time so you'll need fewer of them whereas the tape drive will have a set maximum storage space. And what if the tape drive dies and the company is out of business? You may end up not being able to read your tapes. SATA on HHDs has continued backward compatibility for decades.

Anwyay, for a home user with a few hundred TB to store, I'd be surprised if the cost would be better for tape. It's really useful for places that store a few hundred TB per day, though. That's where tape can be a boon. The primary advantages are it takes up a lot less physical space per TB and lasts longer. And once you do get past the cost of the drives, it does eventually start to be cheaper.

Also, remember it's way slower than a physical HDD much less an SSD. Even an HDD connected via USB.

Do you need tape? Do you really need that much data? Archival grade DVDs can store a few GB (an order of magnitude less than the TBs you asked for!), and probably easier to find/source.

Yes, but not as an out of the box solution. Tape drives use standard sizes, and standard interfaces (often serial attached SCSI). You can buy a tape drive and a USB encloser that lets you put your own drive in it and the tape drive will work. You need to make sure the USB encloser provides enough power, is big enough, and has the correct interface, but it will "just work" if you select the right parts and plug them in. Do make sure you read the spec - some cheaper enclosers may not support USB3 data rates which you tape drive may need to work well.

The USB designers made the decision back in the day that they would not design a protocol for CDrom (then important), tape, or other such things. Instead they designed a "here is how to transmit SCSI over USB", which makes it cheap to design USB to SCSI adapters and that is what has been done.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

5 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 9 acronyms.

[Thread #85 for this comm, first seen 22nd Aug 2026, 01:30] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]