donnie_g

Why use tape? Because you can make multiple copies of your TB+ of data at 1/16th the cost of buying multiple sets of hard drives. 250gb drives from newegg.com are about 74 bucks minus shipping. Thats 300 bucks per TB of storage minus the cost of the hardware to house it. Or, you can spend about 18 bucks on 400g tapes and make as many copies as you want for a fraction of the cost. Modern day tape devices are far from slow now. It only takes about 2 hours to back up 1TB of data to tape. That includes the time to switch tapes.

Bob, I agreed with what you were saying until I read your last paragraph:

 

"I weighed hard drives from a few years ago and the hard drive being made now. 1/3 of the weight has been removed. No cooling systems. Terrible construction. I actually add 2 fans just for the hard drives just to keep them cool. Also people (jerks) are building some machines are getting so hot that they are water cooled, like a radiator. Silly people and designers that don't know what they are doing. should be fired. Stay away from places like PC Club."

 

First, manufacturers are purposely making drives lighter for efficiency. Hard drives are not like power supplies where weight reflects the quality of components. Second, I am assuming you meant 'internal' cooling on hard drives. Hard drives have never had internal cooling, nor have they had passive heat sinks placed on them direct from the manufacturer. All cooling has ?always? been from external fans, whether it?s from a computer case fan or a rack mount chassis with numerous fans just for the drives. There are a couple companies who design their drive casings with ?fins? that resemble regular heat sinks, that?s Western Digital and Seagate in their high end SATA line of drives. You are correct in adding a couple fans to keep the drives cool, however.

 

As far as the ?jerks? that are building machines that get hot enough to require water cooling, well, I will say this. Those are the enthusiast PC builders who want maximum performance from their machines. There is absolutely nothing wrong with water cooling. In most cases the computer becomes silent and requires only one fan for the radiator. These are great for HTPC?s and the like. Plus, water cooling allows the enthusiasts to over clock their machines CPU?s and GPU?s beyond the normal MHz/GHz range. Believe it or not, most manufacturers are embracing over clocking. That includes AMD and Intel. So, please don?t call them ?silly? or say they don?t know what they?re doing. You ?must? know what you are doing if you want to setup water cooling on a machine. One last note, there is nothing wrong with enthusiast websites (PC Club).

 

 

 

Nels, have you ever considered tape backups? I have over 1 TB of photos that I backup regularly to a DLT tape drive. The initial cost of the drive can be painful, but the media is reasonably priced, and most tape manufactures state that tapes produced within the last two years have a shelf life of up to 7 years, if not a little more.