Tape drive or disk drive?

[HeroHog]

Strictly for backups, though. Not all their computery needs.

No doubt!

[HeroHog]

What size disks 8", 5.25" or 3.5" ?

What kind of tape reel to reel, cassette, or cartridges ?

Wire core memory and disc packs!

[RevDisk]

Imagine that you could only get to choose one to use for all of your computery needs.

What do you choose and why?

How much data?  More than 6TB?  Tape. That's not a question, it's a statement of reality unless you are willing to pay 10x tape costs due to niche circumstances. Tape is dirt cheap, reliable and shelf stable. Hard drive is a good option for short term retention, small backups and/or as an intermediary stage because it's cheap ish but fast. A 6TB HD is only $250.

But as a rule of thumb, you actually want disk to disk to tape. You want to back up your stuff to cheap slow hard drives, and then backup that to tape. Low hit on your production systems, quick recovery, all things considered cheap, and damn secure. Practice your recoveries regularly. A 26TB NAS in RAID5 or RAID6 is only like $2-$3k. Dirt cheap, in other words. A tape drive is $1k-$15k. Autoloaders with magazines and tape silos are expensive, but not necessary unless you have enough data that you have a full time sysadmin / backup person. Tape is infinitely superior to hard drive in every way except for speed.



If you go with hard drives, go with the Toaster. I'm not recommending that specific Toaster, btw, just showing you what I'd recommend. They make 1x, 2x, 4x, 6x and (rarely) 8x Toasters, so you could slap in a large number of multi TB hard drives for ease of backups.

http://www.amazon.com/Sabrent-External-Duplicator-Function-EC-HDD2/dp/B00IKC14OG/

  
For small amounts of data? Flash drives or SD cards. Cheap, durable, fast as hell.

[RevDisk]

I'm a bit of a computer geek being a former PC tech -> Net admin - > Programmer -> Sr Programmer/Analyst -> retired/disabled idiot living on the internet. I have 4 notebook computers running here in the living room all storing their working files on the SAN drive via WiFi/1 gigabit hard wire. Then there are our 2 iPhones and the wife's Kindle Fire tied into the WiFi net as well. The 4 notebooks all run SETI@home when we aren't actively using them so the spare cycles don't go to waste. One notebook is tied into the 1,000 watt surround sound 6 speaker system and uses the TV as a monitor. All the notebooks and the wife's iPhone are remote accessible from my notebook and iPhone from anywhere in the world where I can access the internet. In our office there is a WiFi repeater that is hard wired to the HP Duplex Laser and HP color Inkjet scanner/copy/fax/duplex business class printers.

http://herohog.com/images/House/entctr.jpg
At the bottom left of the shot is a pile of .5 and 1tb pocket drives.

Yeah, I'm a bit of a geek...

Did pretty much the same thing.   

[HeroHog]

Nice clean setup!

[KD5NRH]

We even have one location that uses a 5-1/4 inch floppy for the boot routine. Yup still relying on a 5-1/4 inch floppy with a penciled in date from 1988 to keep the switch alive.

Sounds like luck, given my experiences with the failure rate of 5.25" floppies in frequent use.  A quick search of DX didn't turn anything up, but surely somebody makes a FDD-CF or similar interface cheap enough to be a good kludge for this.

[RevDisk]

Sounds like luck, given my experiences with the failure rate of 5.25" floppies in frequent use.  A quick search of DX didn't turn anything up, but surely somebody makes a FDD-CF or similar interface cheap enough to be a good kludge for this.

USB interface
http://www.deviceside.com/fc5025.html
http://shop.deviceside.com/

Disks
http://www.amazon.com/High-Density-5-25-Floppy-Disks/dp/B00JASUCWE
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00004Z5U6/

Drives
http://www.amazon.com/NEWTRONICS-D509V3-MITSUMI-INTERNAL-FLOPPY/dp/B00B875KJU

Or one stop shopping: http://floppydisk.com/

[KD5NRH]

USB interface
http://www.deviceside.com/fc5025.html

Wrong direction; I meant to make a CF card look like a FDD to the unit.  I recall having some adapters back in the early 90s to adapt other stuff to a FDD edge connector so it could just be plugged in in place of the FDD.  Had the interesting side effect of convincing the BIOS that it was looking at a 360K or 1.44M drive with several hundred megs of data on it when using tape or CD that way.

[just Warren]

This is very similar to what our tape library looked like. It has a "human motion" arm that moved in arcs like a human does, not in a series of linear movements. WAY cool to watch in operation!

Great. Now I've got a crush on yet another machine. That thing is beautiful.


My OP was certainly inarticulate but this thread has turned into something wonderful.

[RevDisk]

There's tape libraries, and then there are tape silos. Some of them are...  big. Very very very big. LTO-6 is cutting down on the sizes, thank the gods.

[KD5NRH]

Great. Now I've got a crush on yet another machine. That thing is beautiful.

Makes me want to find one, rework it for 8 track, and build a jukebox.

[RoadKingLarry]

Sounds like luck, given my experiences with the failure rate of 5.25" floppies in frequent use.  A quick search of DX didn't turn anything up, but surely somebody makes a FDD-CF or similar interface cheap enough to be a good kludge for this.

That would actually cost $$. The way it is now if when it all falls to crap the company gets to blame the tech involved.

Not exactly frequent use though. I've been working on that switch off and on for over 10 years now and I only had to use it twice in that time. The first time, about 8 years ago, I raised a fuss about it and made several suggestions for an update but it all went into the blackhole of management.

[Scout26]

The most important aspect of this thread is that in a TEOTWAWKI or Zombie Apocalypse one can use burning floppy disks to signal others and keep warm....