Backup Tapes Come Again To The Homelab

It’s one of many nice mysteries of computing, how by some means within the Year Of OLlama 2026, tape stays the god of low cost storage. Some time again [Ben Pettis] recounted his expertise setting up an LTO-5 tape drive in his homelab, an expertise which solely turns into extra related as arduous drive costs keep excessive.

LTO-5 is already properly outdated within the skilled planet, in spite of everything– a brand new server set up could be debating the deserves of LTO-9 versus LTO-10, however for the homelab it’s a matter of what’s inexpensive on the used market with decently-sized cartridges. If you’ll be able to reside with 1.5 TB of uncompressed knowledge on a roughly palm-sized Linear Tape, Open cartridge then LTO-5 might be adequate. Yes, the tapes are advertized as 3GB, however that’s assuming a 2:1 compression ratio on the info, which you’re not prone to get on the photographs and video that make up a lot of an information horder’s storage. That’s one factor [Ben] was fast to clear up for us. He additionally detailed his adventures with the cheaper-to-buy fiber channel mannequin of drive.

Tape drives often include an SAS or fiber channel interface– fiber channel being, you guessed it, an optical answer in contrast to the SCSI-like SAS connection chances are you’ll be accustomed to for block storage units. With a PCIe adapter it’s not arduous to arrange, offered you get the cables the suitable manner round! That’s one other element we’re glad [Ben] shared so we are able to discover it once more if now we have the identical drawback: with no swap within the circuit, you want a crossover cable to deliver TX to RX. Which is clear looking back, however obscure to these of us simply studying about the usual.

The benefit, as [Ben] makes clear and everybody has all the time recognized is just value. As of this writing, diskprices.com has 16$/TB because the lowest price, whereas [Ben] was in a position to decide up lightly-used tapes on eBay for under 2$/TB. If you’ve got numerous knowledge, these financial savings amortize the drive prices comparatively shortly, since a used drive like [Ben]’s may be had for just a few hundred bucks.

Is it the final word answer for our data storage woes? That is dependent upon your wants, however maybe not contemplating we get as many recommendations on storing data on reel-to-reel as we do on LTO. We even noticed a tape-loading robotic repurposed to serve bar one time.