Adventures with LTO-5 Tape in 2023

One technology I've become increasingly passionate about is LTO tape technology. The idea is that it's an open standard tape format that can do data archival at a reasonable price (more on this shortly) that lasts for several decades in storage.

I say at a reasonable price, but there's typically a massive up-front cost within the tape drive itself. However, in the long run, after say, hundreds and hundreds of terabytes of data, the cost does become far more reasonable at a price per terabyte. For example, currently an LTO-9 tape, which can store 45TB of compressed data, or 18TB, can be purchased in the $80-90 range. Not many other storage options come even close to that price. But, the price of the tape drive is an eye-watering $4,000 to $6,000. Yes, several thousand dollars.

That's a problem, a big problem for home consumers. But, not all hope is lost. LTO-6 (and lower) tape drives have ultimately become more obsolete and less within business usage as time has progressed to these more advanced tape technologies. Being a reasonably broke university student, I opted for an LTO-5 tape drive that cost only a mere $200. LTO-5 gives me typically 1.5TB of space per tape. It can be a challenge to buy tapes at $6 per tape, but the deals are out there. That's slightly better than consumer HDDs right now, just barely. Most of the time, you'll end up buying tapes around $9 a tape, which is not really good enough unless you truly have immensely precious data you want to protect at a large scale.

Which I don't really have! But, I wanted to learn about the technology and find a use case, my use case was pretty simple, it turned out to be just archiving old family videos, pictures, etc. I've suffered the woes of hard drive failure before and losing data. But, the nice thing is that it's easy enough to make several backups no problem with tape, store them, and forget! I'm...still a little hesitant in that, I worry the lifespan on my tapes isn't necessarily decades long at this stage. After all, LTO-5 is an older technology, but, I have confidence while I slowly accumulate more backup solutions that it'll hold out, for now.

So, just some quick thoughts on the technology, really.