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stonogo • 01/16/2026 • 1 reply • view on HN

    unless tape, and the infrastructure to support it, is dramatically cheaper than disk,
This turns out to be the case, with the cost difference growing as the archive size scales. Once you hit petascale, it's not even close. However, most large-scale tape deployments also have disk involved, so it's usually not one or the other.

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xk3 • 01/16/2026

You might squirm at using refurbished or used media but those 3TB SAS ex-enterprise disks are often the same price or cheaper than tapes themselves (excluding tape drive costs!). Will magnetic storage last 30 years? Probably not but they don't instantly demagnetize either. Both tape and offline magnetic platters benefit from ideal storage conditions.

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