The most reliable tape system in the universe can't compare with any ordinary hard drive or stick of ram or network card. Quite the contrary. The most reliable tape system in the universe will easily outlast any ordinary hard drive. Even the r/w head of an STK drive has a guaranteed lifetime of 8.5 years. An ordinary harddrive will die after five years, on average.
Agree.
If you want to take the concept of a tape system as a whole, including the process of cycling out old tapes and old tape drives, well, gee, that only works by dint of a human manuall, actively replacing parts continuously, being knowledgeable and always doing the right thing. That's kind of a ridiculous amount of overhead compared to a hard drive that can read and write a zillion times perfectly all by itself for free for some number of years. You might be right, but when we're talking about tape, it's because we're talking about reliable storage, not read/write operations. Brian, take any ordinary harddrive today and write a file to it. I'll do the same to a 9840 tape. Then we store them in a dry place at 10-20C for 10 years. I'll bet I can still retrieve the file, and I'll also bet that you can't. (I've already tried both).
Agree, my money is on the tape. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org