Garbage Collection #006 – LTO-8 and the Future of Tape

Garbage Collection #006 – LTO-8 and the Future of Tape

Chris EvansGarbage Collection

This week LTO-8 was announced, with raw cartridge capacities of up to 12.8TB.  In this podcast, recorded on 23rd October 2017, Chris and Martin discuss the evolution of LTO from a lowly 100GB to todays media with 120x the capacity.

Tape is changing and becoming more of an archive medium, as backup has increasingly moved to disk.  This begs the question, should standard formats like LTFS be more common?  How should media be recycled and what other ways are there for getting data onto tape media?

For a bit of nostalgia, there’s mention of the Microdrive from Sinclair and the once ubiquitous Jazz and ZIP drives.

Don’t forget to rate us on iTunes, it only takes a moment!

Elapsed Time: 00:27:46

Timeline

  • 00:00:00 – Introductions
  • 00:01:10 – LTO-8 is released – LTO speeds and feeds (link)
  • 00:04:00 – Positioning against the competition – 3592 and T10000, LTO competes
  • 00:06:40 – The changing position of tape
  • 00:08:00 – Backup has changed to re-provisioning, with restore only for the data
  • 00:10:10 – What happened to LTFS? Still used to ship content around (link)
  • 00:11:45 – Spectra Logic Black Pearl – a gateway to getting data onto tape (link)
  • 00:13:20 – Tape as the perfect medium for archive
  • 00:15:00 – LTO-8-M 50% extra capacity (link)
  • 00:17:00 – Jaz and ZIP Drives! (link)
  • 00:18:10 – The ZX Spectrum Microdrive (link)
  • 00:20:30 – Archive and compliance for tape
  • 00:22:50 – Refresh and maintaining an archive
  • 00:24:30 – The hundred year archive
  • 00:25:00 – The effect of GDPR on archiving and data deletion with tape

Companies/Products Mentioned in this Podcast

Iomega, HPE, Quantum, IBM, Sinclair Research, Spectra Logic, Black Pearl

Copyright (c) 2016-2017 Storage Unpacked.  No reproduction or re-use without permission.