MichaelKammes's video: 5 THINGS: On LTO Tape episode 202

In this episode of 5 THINGS, Michael explores what YOU need to know about LTO tape! 1. What is LTO? 2. Why should I care? 3. What are the downsides of LTO? 4. What tech do I need? 5. How much does LTO cost? Complete transcript at http://5thingsseries.com/lto/ Closed Captioning available. What 5 Things do you want to know about? Let me know! Web: http://5thingsseries.com Facebook: http://facebook.com/5thingsseries Twitter: http://twitter.com/michaelkammes/ Episode Excerpt: Question What is LTO? For a Limited Time Only You have a License To Operate… Lettuce, Tomato and Onion. No, tech friends, it’s yet another F*CKING storage medium, because, you know, spinning disk, solid state, optical drives, and the cloud just didn’t keep us busy enough. It’s magnetic tape, and it’s the least sexy sibling in the storage family (and yes… there are sexy storage family members.) It’s been around since the late 90’s. Linear Tape Open was initially used to backup Excel docs and your credit card numbers in data centric business centers. It’s only been over the past 8 or 9 years or so that the capacity, speed, and file accessibility has allowed LTO to be used in the realm most of us are familiar with…that is, with rich media. Initially, folks used proprietary and expensive software to write data onto an LTO tape in a TAR format. The TAR format is a way of wrapping many files together – much like a ZIP file, only TAR retains user and file permissions. While TAR was great at wadding all your files up for retrieval at a later date, it could be quite a pain to retrieve any 1 file – often times the entire TAR file had to be scanned – or in some cases, the entire TAR had to be restored and all of the data extracted – for your one single file. And so it was, in the year of our lord 2010, LTFS was brought to the tape masses. LTFS, or Linear Tape File System – enabled LTO tape drives to be seen and somewhat utilized at the OS level, kinda like a USB or thumb drive would appear on your system…with some caveats. As LTFS emerged on the scene as a way to bypass many of the hurdles of tape usage, it was the capacity and speed of the LTFS format that made the format very attractive. GB and TB of data could fit in your hand, could run at speeds far surpassing Firewire 800, and it cost 6x less than the cheapest hard drives out there. Today, we have LTO-7; clocking in at 6TB per tape and reaching speed of up to 300MB/s. Question Why should I care? As is with most tech things nowadays, price is the overriding factor. LTO-7 is cheaper than the cloud, as well as even the cheapest bargain bin hard drives. It’s difficult to compare cloud storage, which is based a rental model, vs buying drives outright, which is a 1 time cost. So, I’ve averaged prices out over 4 years. After 4 years, 80% of hard drives out in the wild still function, so it’s a good ballpark number to compare from. Another key statistic not represented is that data on an LTO tape can be compressed, thereby gaining 2 or more times the storage capacity on the same LTO tape. When we also look at read and write times, LTO-7 has a theoretical max speed of 300MB/s. This is much faster than USB 2.0 and any flavor of Firewire, as well as almost 3x faster than standard office ethernet connections. I’ll admit, even though it’s twice as fast as the last generation of LTO-6, it’s becoming less impressive, with newer computers coming stock with USB 3.0, eSATA and Thunderbolt ports…but it still smokes your few MegaBytes a second up to the cloud. Now, I’m sure all of us have had the unfortunate experience to lose a beloved hard drive. Either due to age, or knocking a can of cherry coke onto the drive. (true story) Hard drives are volatile punk bastards and often leave this mortal coil way too soon. While the cloud is undeniably the most reliable and immune to random bouts of Cherry Coke, the aforementioned upload and download speed to the cloud severely impacts the usefulness of the medium. You also get dinged a bit more on retrieval of that cloud stored media, which could seriously hose your budget. LTO tape, on the other hand, takes a licking and keeps on ticking. LTO is rated for 15-30 years of shelf life – which makes it an ideal candidate for secure, long term backup and archival. Plus, many insurance companies often will lower insurance rates for on location work if the media from the shoot is retained on LTO tape. As a bonus, many studios and networks often have a deliverables list with LTO tapes listed as a mandatory format.