Tape Backup Drive... Should I buy one.

drewpul · 07 Jun 2010

I was cleaning up some old closets in my school's computer lab. I came across a few old backup tapes. I was talking to my friend, and he told me that you can get tapes pretty cheap to use for backup purposes. On the hp website, you can buy a 3TB tape for only $120!! That is a whole lot cheaper than a backup hard drive.

What would I need to get a tape drive for my laptop. I don't need the newest, just something to use this awesome technology!!

-Drew

wallyinnc · 07 Jun 2010

Drew, I have never used tapes. But don't forget that they are serial write and read and will loose the magnetization in time (how long I have no idea).

Ztruker · 07 Jun 2010

<MHO ON>
I wouldn't use a tape for anything.

1. Very, very slow
2. Serial access so even slower when wanting to restore
3. May be hard to find anything that works with Windows 7
4. 2TB hard drives are not expensive, 3TB are quite a bit more.

Stick with a hard drive
<MHO OFF>

Mellon Head · 07 Jun 2010

They didn't call those things "Screaming Tape Backups" for nothing, either.

God, some of those things are loud.

drewpul · 08 Jun 2010

Yea, I wasn't sure if they would be for me anyway. I just thought they were cool.

"But don't forget that they are serial write and read and will loose the magnetization in time (how long I have no idea)."

wallyinnc, hp claims that they last over 30 years of shelf life. That is pretty good considering Hard drives are 10-15 years. Does anyone know what hard drives are??

wallyinnc · 08 Jun 2010

30 years would be great, but probably in a controlled environment (IT room type). Anyway, it doesn't look like they are shot lived anyway.

I don't know about HDs, but I think 10 ~15 years is too long. The thing is that I believe they become obsolete before that. I will never forget a professor of mine (and that was some 15 years ago) saying he had bought this 500MB hard drive and could compress it to 1GB, he would never need to buy another HD again! I just remembered what a mess it was when you compressed drives back then, no reliability at all...