Why does everyone use HDD? It must be the worst archive device ever. Seems to me you have to manage RAID arrays -- sit on them like a mother hen. Suppose I want to join a Satanic Cult for 5 years and leave my video projects on the table? Then quit the cult and return to video -- I'd hate to come back to those 5 y/o HDD's and pray they fired up again. BDD doesn't have the capacity. LTO and DLT seem the most bulletproof solution. What am I missing? Are the Data tape decks just too expensive? I noticed the vendors never seem to post their prices.

I have boxes of HDV tapes that I find extremely comforting, my HDD's? Not so much.

@brianluce You don't need more complicated RAID configurations for archive. It's easier to just archive to a single HDD and offline it.

I think tapedrives works better for backup solutions. For data storage tapes are a bit slow to use, and need good software (Arcserve, Veritas). Broblem usually is library what is where. LTOs DLTs have wery long life, and are wery reliable if storaget right thats good point. I tryed DLT as datastorage some years ago, but get frustrated quite soon. Still using them as bu in my vital server configuration.

@brianluce Don't use that specific drive, but a similar one by Tandberg.

From what I read from the description their 'professional video enhancement' may be nothing more than a fancy mxf based interface similar to LTFS, because LTFS is only supported since LTO-5.

As I wrote already in the NAS thread, these drives are really only for backup/archiving, imho. 544 Mb/sec sounds nice, but that's read (streaming) speed, without seek time. So for just moving some files between sites a HDD is definitely more convenient. And normally they only have 200-300 complete write cycles per definition.

But for archiving/backup these tapes are unbeatable. Using them since ~2001 (LTO-1) and upgraded to LTO-3 a few years ago (LTO-3 drives are the 'last' to be compatible with LTO-1 tapes). No Problems so far, the drive (SCSI version) still works without flaws, and the tapes are virtually indestructible.

Don't know why so few people are using them, since the ~$1000-$1500 for the drive is a one time investment and you can use it for many years, some of them are built like tanks. I know, because I dropped mine a few times.

@KeithLommel : You can also get yourself a LTO-5 drive within the same price range nowadays, which stores 1.5 TB UNcompressed (~$70 per Tape). I'm normally in the game business, but doing also trailers, animation and occasional VFX for music/film. So we have a lot of footage like mattes, renders with additional alpha's/depth/surface id/normal etc channels and these compress really well. So in reality you can fit even 5-10 TB to a single tape.

From my experience, the tapes still work flawless, even 11 years later. Can't say that from any CD/DVD/HDD out there. That's the real difference between the systems: DVD/HDD you have to check far earlier for defects and then maybe copy them to new ones (and hopefully you did write parity info to another drive), if they start to degrade. And maybe it's just my paranoia, but the bigger the drive, the sooner it fails.

For shortterm backup, there's nothing against HDD's, but for longterm I will always prefer tape.

I specially want to underline how small amount of WORM solutions exist or are being developed.
Normal people for storing their work really need mostly WORM solutions with extremely large reliability.
I am all for something looking like rock, something that is almost impossible to destroy, even intentionally.