Re: I give up

[Jeff Garzik <jeff@garzik.org>]

Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu wrote:
> On Mon, 09 Apr 2007 16:08:34 EDT, Jeff Garzik said:
>> With current hard drive prices (200GB @ US$55, 500GB @ US$120) you can 
>> just keep buying hard drives :)
>>
>> Surely tape price/GB is higher than hard drive price/GB...
> 
> Erm. No.  We're in the middle of installing an StorageTek SL8500 for backups,
> simply because an LTO3 tape holds 300G at a price point of $100 or so.
> And there's no sane way to build a half-petabyte disk farm at that price.
> (And yes, our tape backup service is well into the half-petabyte range, and
> will probably shoot over that as soon as the SL8500 is in production and we
> deal with all the backlogged requests for backup service).
> 
> Don't forget to factor in the cost of disk shelves, power, cooling, and all
> that when you're building something to hold 2,500 200G drives.  Oh. and
> controllers.  And machines to put the controllers in... and all the rest of it.

Who says you have to keep the hard drives plugged into a machine at all 
times?


> And remember - you *dont* want to be backing up critical data on the sort of
> hard drives that cost $55 for 200G - you'll want multiple copies, probably
> some RAID, etc etc.  

The same can be said for tape.  Anyone who only has a single tape backup 
of critical data is an idiot.  Plenty of war stories where such 
scenarios go awry...

	Jeff