If yesterday we talked about the drop in sales of hard drives, today we have to talk about how even after a long time, how certain technologies are still used to make data backups at the business level. Which are alternatives to conventional hard drives such as storage tapes, which are still used after decades. What is the reason why they are still used today?
A backup is nothing more than a complete and one-time dump of all the information contained in a storage format. Normally, we usually use hard drives in our homes, however, there is a problem that these break over time and with it the data is lost. Furthermore, what do you do if you are a large company where the volume of data to be stored is so large that you have a huge amount of terabytes of information to store? Well, this is where the use of certain types of storage formats comes in.
Storage tapes are still used today
They have been used since the dawn of computing, however, by their nature they are not good for use in a computer system. The reason for this is that they are not good at making random access to information. However, they are ideal for creating backup copies in case it is necessary to restore the information later in the event of a disaster.
To this end, the so-called LTO tapes are used today, which are built using a Strontium Ferrite layer that allows up to 580 TB of storage to be stored in a single unit in the best cases. In the most conventional cases we can find tapes that They use strontium ferrite and can store up to 30 TB for a cost of €100. A much lower price than a conventional hard drive.
They are even much cheaper than using Blu-Ray discs, where a reel costs 50 units of 25 GB per disc can be found for 60 euros. So it is the cheapest way that exists today to store cold data for later recovery in the event of a disaster.
The sale of tapes grows, that of hard drives does not
While some do not stop denying reality, the data is there. If a few hours ago we have told you that the sale of hard drives has had a significant decline, then to our great regret we have to inform you that something that has been used for many decades now, such as storage tapes, is growing in terms of its consumption by large companies. And it is that, in recent years, the amount of information stored in this format, measured in Exabytes, has been increasing and is expected to have an annual growth between 13% and 25% year-on-year in the coming years.
How much information that is not available to the general public will be stored on these storage tapes and that has been accumulated in the last decades? It is something that, honestly, we would like to know.
