The annoying thing is that the drives are so expensive.
What's in a LTO drive that costs so much to make, and why can't it cost the same as a hard disk? When I think of it a hard disk seems rather more complicated.
It’s probably economies of scale - not a lot of tape drives being manufactured these days and most are for enterprise usage, not cost-sensitive end users.
NRE: non-recurring engineering expenses. Every product needs to be researched and designed before manufacturing. Take all of those costs and divide by the number sold (which in the case of tape drives is very low).
As IBM seems to be the last man standing in the tape storage market, the TCO price of tape is not a market price against competitors, but against HDD storage.
The TCO of tape only makes sense at scale, and is much harder to assess than HDDs, as tape cost includes media, drives and libraries, each of which have different life times. Tape libraries can be used across many tape generations.
> As IBM seems to be the last man standing in the tape storage market
I wonder if IBM is going to introduce a new generation of 3592, or is LTO the “last man standing” too?
The latest IBM 3592 drive generation (20TB uncompressed), came out in 2018. At the time, their roadmap had future generations promising 30, 40, 80 TB capacity-but I’m thinking, five years on, if they were going to deliver any of that, surely they would have by now?
They're expensive because they aren't made for home users. Tape drives are made in far smaller volumes than say hard drives, yet have most of the same R&D costs.
What's in a LTO drive that costs so much to make, and why can't it cost the same as a hard disk? When I think of it a hard disk seems rather more complicated.