TechRadar Professional has rcently posted a planet unique, the first ever review of an LTO-9 tape generate, the OWC Mercury Professional LTO.
The first these types of solution to have reached our exam bench amazed our reviewer and seasoned veteran of several tape wars enough to give it a powerful 4/5 rating.
The system is pricey (at far more than $6,000) but the truth that it can just take 18TB LTO-9 cartridges signifies that 1PB of info saved will expense you just below $15,000 with the charge of the unit factored in. 56 challenging disk drives on the other hand expense extra (all over $18,000 with 18TB drives), are far more fragile and much more wieldy when it will come to moving all around (a difficult disk drive weighs around the same as a few tapes).
Powerful begin
Some may possibly position out that cloud backup companies like Backblaze or cloud storage companies like Box present unlimited storage. But your time is almost certainly considerably far too cherished to shell out times if not weeks uploading terabyte-dimensions files.
And when LTO-9 appears to be the great candidate for backing up big datasets on premise at scale, theres nonetheless a good deal of area for enhancement. Our reviewer noted that an exquisite way to take care of tape has still to be observed (while it is unlikely that a person dimensions will in shape all).
Tape storage 101
As for the OWC tape travel alone, there were being difficulties, none of which ended up important but they highlighted the truth that there is a lot to be accomplished. Simply purchasing this unit mainly because it can spam 18TB of info to a tape reasonably proficiently is not ample, and there is significantly much more to applying it that is initially apparent, our critique.
Thats not to say that it is not a able beast as it features two other handy options alternatively than just the label of tape backup. You can plug in a SATA or SAS SSD/HDD in a 3.5-inch push enlargement bay for added storage and backup capability.
OWC engineers ended up smart ample to incorporate a DisplayPort connector and two Thunderbolt 3 ports which usually means you can also demand your laptop (up to 85W) and plug in an 8K observe (or Tv set). An external hard push, a tape push and a docking station all rolled into 1.
For long run iterations, we count on the drive to have far more ergonomic handles, the potential to improve to LTO-10 just by swapping an interior drive out, OWC ArGest backup computer software bundled by default, extra ports (such as a LAN 1 if attainable).