LTO drives are pretty cost effective for huge archivals, but given the recent developments with everything being so expensive.

Would you be interested in a miniaturized format of LTO?

Something like a Data8 cartridge, in a shell with magent protection, so you can have a singular terabyte or less in a safe and portable size.

I could imagine it running in two modes, fast or slow, with varying storage capacities, based on use case. Maybe 256 MBps slow, and 512MBps fast, just throwing a number out there.

I can imagine some use cases:

  1. PS6 physical games (as installation disks)
  2. Backup format for power users (instead of a full fledged LTO drive)
  3. Recording equipment (music, video)
  4. Became you like the noise
  5. Because you want to have cassette futurism
  6. Physical game ownership

Edit 1: Just learned that Accelis LTO is exactly what I imagine and was abandoned by the LTO foundation. ☹️

  • pineapple@lemmy.mlEnglish
    4·
    1 hour ago

    I get scared by cold storage since you never know when it dies. After 20 years and finding that thing you wanted who knows if it’s kicked the bucket by then?

  • HiddenLayer555@lemmy.mlEnglish
    3·
    2 hours ago

    ONLY if it’s an open standard anyone can make readers and tape for.

    Especially not a fan of getting fucked over when the company randomly decides to discontinue the product line when the whole point of the product is long term data archival.

  • MalReynolds@slrpnk.netEnglish
    9·
    12 hours ago

    Honestly, the world is crying out for a new consumer offline backup media, hasn’t been anything since BluRay. Even just whacking a USB3 onto LTO5/6 and not having it cost the earth for drive or media would sell like hot cakes.

    Something a lot nicer is cooking in China (Microsoft has been sitting on it as Project Silica for years now). That looks to be a 360TB CD sized disc good for 10000+ years cold storage, currently $30K writer and $6K reader, but that was the case with CDs too once.

    I can see why our corpo lords and masters wouldn’t want us having a device that let us fit all of Netflix in the palm of our hands, but whoever mass produced it and brought the price down to reasonable would make an absolute fortune. Here’s hoping the latter greed wins out, it doesn’t seem like the drives are made with any sort of unobtianium. A new era of CD burners would be highly welcome.

    • HobbitFoot @thelemmy.clubEnglish
      21·
      10 hours ago

      If the world was crying out for it, a company would have developed a standard by now.

      There may be a market, but it is the fraction of what it was 20 years ago.

      • ☂️-@lemmy.ml
        3·
        5 hours ago

        yeah with how they push ClOuD StOrAgE as the next media format, it seems they are happy to store your data themselves.

      • MalReynolds@slrpnk.netEnglish
        3·
        8 hours ago

        Just because it’s not your use case (and maybe you’d find a use if it was available), doesn’t mean it’s not a common one. Market opportunities get missed all the time. People have been making do with offline HDDs, which is a waste of their potential, and they’re now victim to the RAMpocalypse price hike too.

        Just as an example, people would probably take a lot more video with their oh so capable phones if there was somewhere to put TBs of it cheaply.

        • HobbitFoot @thelemmy.clubEnglish
          11·
          8 hours ago

          I’m not speaking to my use case, I’m speaking about the market as a whole.

          You can buy an Ultra Blu-ray burner along with 100 GB discs. There are alternatives already out there on the market and it likely wouldn’t be a major jump tech wise to get up to the TB range. People used to have binders full of data, this would continue that trend. Yet no one it’s developing it, including Chinese tech companies.

          I’m not doubting that there are use cases out there; I can even think of a use case for me. Yet, the market demand out there doesn’t seem to be worth it where any company wants to take that leap.

          That Sony is abandoning physical media for games when it won two generations for discs based on its gaming consoles is a giant red flag.

          • MalReynolds@slrpnk.netEnglish
            2·
            8 hours ago

            Sony has all sorts of other (evil) reasons. I’m saying it’d be a build it and they will come thing, as were CDs originally, it’s very existence would create use cases.

  • solrize@lemmy.ml
    6·
    14 hours ago

    Um obviously it will depend on the cost, and tape in general these days is seen as an enterprise thing with prices to match. Are you going to make a tape drive? What about the tape?

    1TB isn’t that interesting since you can get LTO-5 or LTO-6 (1.5TB or 2.5TB native) fairly affordably these days. The physical size of the cartridge isn’t that important for most of us.