Yeah, the back-compat story for LTOs is not great. They are going to try and improve it starting with LTO-10.
It was partially on purpose for the earlier LTO generations. The capacity/speed ratio was not too high, so you could just keep upgrading your library in the background every decade. It outweighed the complexity of designing backwards-compatible hardware.
But it's becoming less practical now. LTO-4 is 1.6Tb with 160Mb read speed, so each tape takes just about 3 hours to read. LTO-10 is 40Tb with 400Mb read speed, resulting in more than 24 hours of time to read one tape.
Drive availability is an interesting question in itself. Laser drivers are pretty complicated beasts themselves that require highly precise mechanics. Tape drives are much simpler, because the areal information density is about 3 orders of magnitude smaller than on optical media.
The mechanical stuff that loads and unloads the tape and keeps it in tension is crazy, but it's all just regular "macroscopic" parts that can be custom-manufactured if needed.
alt Hacker News
Yeah, the back-compat story for LTOs is not great. They are going to try and improve it starting with LTO-10.
It was partially on purpose for the earlier LTO generations. The capacity/speed ratio was not too high, so you could just keep upgrading your library in the background every decade. It outweighed the complexity of designing backwards-compatible hardware.
But it's becoming less practical now. LTO-4 is 1.6Tb with 160Mb read speed, so each tape takes just about 3 hours to read. LTO-10 is 40Tb with 400Mb read speed, resulting in more than 24 hours of time to read one tape.
Drive availability is an interesting question in itself. Laser drivers are pretty complicated beasts themselves that require highly precise mechanics. Tape drives are much simpler, because the areal information density is about 3 orders of magnitude smaller than on optical media.
The mechanical stuff that loads and unloads the tape and keeps it in tension is crazy, but it's all just regular "macroscopic" parts that can be custom-manufactured if needed.