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The news that DOGE crapped on the use of tape in modern day infrastructure had me blow the dust off my Storage Admin hat and blog about where tape still is used. I checked, this is the first 'storage' tagged post on my blog since 2013!

https://sysadmin1138.net/mt/blog/2025/04/storage-doge-and-cognitive-biases-against-tape.shtml


Storage, DoGE, and cognitive biases against tape

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StaffSRE1138
StaffSRE1138
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When I moved hard into AWS-land, I stopped doing a lot of storage things. What I did was more investigating performance of systems I didn't otherwise control, and a whole lot of teaching of filesystem fundamentals (what's an inode type stuff) to engineers who hadn't had to think of such things.
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Chris Siebenmann
Chris Siebenmann
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The last time I looked (which was a long time ago), the media cost was lower for tapes but the acquisition cost of the tape drives was much higher, so it only paid off if you had enough tapes per drive. We didn't, so we wound up going to hard drives for our backups.
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StaffSRE1138
StaffSRE1138
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@cks That's my understanding as well. For the use-cases I had in the 2005-2011 era, cheap SATA drives were cheaper per archived GB than LTO. That's part of why most real-world deploys keep multiple LTO generations around, to amortize the acquisition costs across longer periods of time. It also makes "copy this to that" operations between LTO generations viable without a disk pass.

Tape is viable for compliance reasons, or if you have legit requirements for many-year offline storage.

@Chris Siebenmann
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