Reddit mentions: The best blank data cartridges

1. ECC support -- If the memory of your QNAP gets corrupted, then your data is lost in transit. By buying ECC Memory, I virtually guarantee that this will not happen to me. (ECC RAM is very similar in concept to RAID6 or RAID5, except instead of for disks ECC RAM is for RAM). Because the entire computer I built is out of ECC RAM, I have one more layer of assurances that the data is safe.
   
   I have unconfirmed ECC Support. Error Correction does not work on this motherboard as I hoped.
   
   
2. ZFS Support -- ZFS is an enterprise filesystem designed to store data and store data well. Bitrot can destroy your data EVEN if you are running RAID drives. By using ZFS (which is constantly scrubbing, checksumming, and double-checking the data), my system is immune to bitrot. Your typical NAS is not.
   
   
3. The Motherboard immediately supports 6 hard drives. The QNAP only supports 2-drives. In the future, when I buy more drives, I can easily expand my computer. The QNAP is stuck with 2-bay at the maximum.
   
   
4. I'm comfortable with FreeBSD -- This is a soft advantage, but I work with Linux systems at work (and Windows at home and work). So I'm very comfortable with tools like RSync and the command line in general. In any case, I have a clear backup strategy for the NAS: insert an external hard drive (probably NTFS formatted) and then RSync the data to the hard drive, and then store the hard drive elsewhere.
   
   
5. ZFS Snapshots -- ZFS has a lot of advantages. Another major advantage that I plan to take advantage of is snapshots. The entire disk can be stored as a snapshot that only takes up space when files are modified. With ZFS Snapshots, I can rollback the filesystem very easily.
   
   
6. I have a full PC -- This box is a fully functioning PC. If I decided to splurge, I can buy a SAS Card and then start chunking out LTO6 tapes (Which are only $30 for 2.5TB of storage). Granted, a LTO6 Tape Drive is extremely expensive, but a "full PC" has almost no limit to the customization options available to me. A more realistic option is to just buy a cheap expansion card and support maybe... 4 more hard drives in my case for only a $40 upgrade.
   
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   So basically, my points come down to:
   
   
7. Reliability (ECC RAM)
   
8. Reliability (ZFS Protection vs Bitrot)
   
9. ZFS Snapshots and Cloning.
   
10. Expandability (6-SATA drives easy. More with a cheap expansion card)
    
11. Expandability
    
12. I personally have familiarity with *nix command line and can comfortably do advanced tasks on Nas4Free beyond what is even available on the WebGUI.
    
    Bitrot is a very simple problem to understand. What happens if instead of failing, a Hard Drive starts returning bad data to you? In traditional RAID, the hard drive has NOT crashed, so parity will not be checked. The file may be corrupted despite RAID protecting you. ZFS adds more checks to protect against this problem, while traditional RAID (which most NAS uses) do not.
    
    There are additional features that are interesting (Webserver support, Bittorrent support, DLNA server, Headless Virtualbox). But I don't plan to do anything complicated. So I'm mostly focused on reliability.
    
    Of course, NAS4Free supports the standard NAS features. You can easily add hard drives to zpools which can then be added to datastores. Volumes can be exported with iSCSI. Datastores can be exported using CIFS / Samba for Microsoft support, NFS for Linux Support, AFP support to support Mac OSX... or all three if you got a complicated setup. QNAP, Synology and all the commercial solutions will get you at least this much, which is hugely useful.

Those numbers in the bottom right (you have it on it's right side, FYI) are the model number. Google that, you get this:

https://www.hifiengine.com/manual_library/sony/tc-252.shtml

Good luck finding parts; i don't think your guy's in working order. But here's the tape:

https://www.amazon.com/Scotch-Magnetic-Recording-Tape-inch/dp/B001DC9H4O

Fully functional and clean those are excellent pieces of equipment. It's no 1/2" tape but it's still pretty fantastic. Mine's a TEAC. It was 20+ when i got it and i've taken reasonably good care of it for the last 20 years and it still works great. Next organic project I do, I'm recording on it. There's nothing else like it.

Probably because it's expensive.

The cameras that are being trialed right now cost like $600 apiece. That gets you hardware that's unintrusive, but only has about five hours of battery life at SD, and three hours in HD; plus it only has enough storage for six hours of HD video (source). Bumping that up adds cost and bulk to an already expensive device. But let's say someone does this, and it's $700 (probably $800, but let's be conservative). That's a cool half million just for one camera per officer. Of course, you're going to need more than that; gotta have spares on hand in case one breaks, malfunctions, gets damaged, wears out, whatever. So we'll round that up to $600,000 for cameras (which is also conservative, IMHO).

Then you have to find a way to store and log all that footage. So now you need additional storage space for all the data where nothing of note happens. So 800 officers times, let's say five hours a day (one hour to arrive, get briefed and orders, and get ready, one hour to get back and check in, and one hour for paperwork) times five days a week. At roughly 6MbPS that's 54 Terabytes of data per week. Now, I don't know about you, but to me 54TB seems like kind of a lot. I work in a video production facility and not that long ago we purchased a 48TB SAN that set us back like $56,000 (note: we were getting a discount because we were trading in some old gear, but let's stick with this number). Let's say that unless otherwise needed this stuff only gets stored "online" for three months, and is stored "offline" for three years (minimally; likely it'd be longer). So we need ~650TB of online storage, and at ~$56k per 48TB, we would need 14 units costing almost $800,000. Offline storage would likely be LTO, we'll assume it's LTO-7, which stores 6.4TB of data per tape, so we'd need 1,210 over three years. Now, LTO-7 hasn't been released yet, so all prices from here on out are for LTO-6, just as an FYI. A single LTO-6 tape costs ~$40, so 1,210 of them would cost close to $50,000. The cheapest LTO-6 drive is bout $2,300 and moves 1.45TB per hour. Moving a month's worth of video (we're not even talking about the ancillary data that would need to be attached to this stuff to make any sense) would take over six days.

So $600,000 for cameras, $800,000 for online storage, $52,300 for offline storage, and we haven't even gotten into the infrastructure to support all this. You can probably chalk up another $100,000 worth of networking and cooling gear (this stuff gets hot).

And this isn't insignificant IT stuff. You're going to have to hire someone to handle all this ingest. And someone's going to have to go through all five hours of footage generated each day and log the stuff. So we have to expand the payroll so we don't end up with unmanageable backlogs. I don't even know where that'll come in, but over the course of three years it'll probably cost more than the equipment.

> I'm not sure about that, but they apparently do use archival backup tapes, which is pretty amazing.

This is actually a bit of a pet peeve of mine. Tape decks are awesome, and are still used all the time. The big reason is that they are amazingly cheap. Here is a 6 TB tape for 30 dollars. If you never want to delete anything, tapes are awesome.

> No? Magnetic tape is not that great at keeping data. Maybe magnetic disks but definitely not tape. tape gets warped in a ton of different ways waaaay too easily. Not to mention has a super low storage capacity

I used to manage tape backup systems for a medical research university, as well as other formats. If stored properly, tapes are your best bet. As far as capacity? It's the cheapest and densest. Here is 6.5TB for $30. It's just slow.

> You had to buy a cd player/stereo/laptop/etc at one point, did you not? I'm not understanding the argument of cost.

Yeah, but my point being is that you likely still have a capable device around. Tape decks? Quite a bit older and less people still have this equipment. Tape decks also lack the multiple use scenario of a CD/DVD drive. Software, data, games, movies, and music all come on discs so the things that play these discs are much more ubiquitous.

>CDs can be found for around $0.30 each

http://www.amazon.com/Verbatim-94691-Branded-Recordable-50-Disc/dp/B00029U1DK/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1375136983&sr=8-1&keywords=blank+cd

$0.20 a CD. So half the cost compared to your number and it only goes cheaper the more bulk you go for.

Let's spend $10 on tapes now to make this purely an Amazon comparison. http://www.amazon.com/Maxell-UR-60-Blank-Audio-Cassette/dp/B000087NBV/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1375137258&sr=8-1&keywords=blank+tape

Well, can't do that, so let's get two of these and spend $12.

$0.75/tape.

You keep bringing up how much they're sold for and that's besides the point. They're selling them for cheaper than CDs because of the market they're selling them to. According to the numbers here it's actually giving the labels a much smaller profit margin.

Tape doesn't have the large album art of vinyl nor the sound quality of vinyl or CDs. They have what, portability? That is why 8 tracks lost according to some. But I'm sure no one is still using that portable tape deck.

Let's say you have a 2016 Subaru Outback which has 73.3 ft^3 of cargo space which the largest of the vehicles listed.

What kind of tapes are you talking about? Let's say you're spending big bucks and travelling with Sony's 185 TB tapes. I can't find anything about its dimensions, but let's for the sake of argument say it's similar to an LTO tape and is 4.5" x 4.3" x 1.1" = 21.285 in^3.

73.3 ft^3 = 126,663 in^3, but you're not going to get 100% packing efficiency due to the tape packaging as well as all those edges in the vehicle. Let's call it 80% packing efficiency to be on the very conservative side = 101,330 in^3.

101,330 in^3 / 21.285 in^3 = 4,760 tapes x 185 TB each = 880,600 TB.

Now let's say you're driving from your New York offices to Los Angeles offices. Google Maps says this is 2,789 miles and will take 40 hours.

But you're not going to drive straight through. You gotta eat, refuel, and sleep, and maybe even see a local tourist site. So let's double the time: 80 hours. So you're transferring 880,600 TB in 80 hours = 11,007.5 TB/hour. Google says this is 24,461,111 Mbps.

> Where are you finding LTO-7 for $90? Please do share

There seem to be plenty on Amazon, to list two:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B019DGCRAW/
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B018J4H8EO/

And thanks for the info on LTO6.

Well they definitely aren't $115.

https://www.amazon.com/Quantum-LTO-Ultrium-7-Data-Cartridge/dp/B018J4H8EO

I'm sure in bulk you could get them closer to $60.

Yep, I've done this before. You'll want a splicing block, as well as tape to join the pieces you've edited together

That's nothing on LTO-6
http://www.amazon.com/LTO-6-Ultrium-6-25TB-Cartridge-C7976A/dp/B00AHQUV3S/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1406264452&sr=8-1&keywords=lto-6

That's buying them one at a time, you could probably save a considerable sum by going through a vendor, and buying in bulk.

Your tape has a magnetic bias on it that is stronger than erase head and the record head can handle. You need to bulk erase it to restore it to operational capability.

As far as C120 cassettes, the primary recommendation is to avoid these tapes due to the thin tape or only run end to end (don't rewind or Fast Forward in the middle). You can find 5 pack at https://smile.amazon.com/Maxell-Audio-Cassette-Normal-120us/dp/B00C3OZQXM/ref=sr_1_3?hvadid=78615123795759&hvbmt=be&hvdev=c&hvqmt=e&keywords=120+minute+cassettes&qid=1565521425&s=gateway&sr=8-3

> LTO6

How exactly does that work when I see things like Price Example 1 and Price Example 2?

I use these. :-)

£1.00 each on Amazon.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Maxell-Audio-90min-Blank-Cassette/dp/B0000C6YAQ/ref=sr_1_3?keywords=cassette+tapes&qid=1556648444&s=gateway&sr=8-3

Sony 6.25TB tape for $30.

We use $15 DAT 72 72GB tapes for database backups at my work.

Just to let everyone know this is £25 on amazon

They weren't as ubiquitous as 60 and 90 mins but def existed back in the late 80s / early 90s.

https://www.amazon.com/Maxell-Minutes-Blank-Audio-Cassette/dp/B000001OKY

The tapes used in the show are UR-60 audio cassettes which hold 30 minutes of audio per side. You can identify the type of tape by looking at this image (note the white text in the red squares). The running times of the episodes are between 54 to 58 minutes, so the show is roughly twice as long as the tapes.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0000C6YAQ/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_mV-9AbGTKYZP6

You should look into tape backup as the storage is very cheap (although the drives tend to be expensive). I presume you don't need access to the data often as you say "archiving".

https://www.amazon.com/Sony-Linear-0-85-Inch-Internal-LTX2500G/dp/B00ARHKUZG/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1526860960&sr=8-4&keywords=tape+backup

800 gb for 25 bucks. If you buy in bulk, it is even cheaper.

Tapes are cheaper than disk based storage. Video is just data...

eg. 3TB for $20: http://www.amazon.com/LTO5-Ultrium-3TB-Data-Tape/dp/B003F8MT5I

I just coincidentally saw this above. $25 and a supposed 120MB/s

Slightly relevant XKCD.

Dollar per byte I believe tapes are the cheapest physical data storage at ~2.4 cents/GB.

Just the first thing I found when searching for those things on Amazon.de: HP Ultrium 4 Cartridge, with shipping it's closer to $30, but still quite cheap compared to HDDs, DVD-Rs or Blurays.

I used these...they were fine... https://www.amazon.com/Sony-DVC60PRL-60min-Premium-Cartridge/dp/B001P8XVK2. If you live near LA I have a couple of unopened boxes you can have.

For metal particle cassettes

This might not be super helpful, but I found this amazon link.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Apple-Rechargable-Battery-15-inch-MacBook/dp/B001IP6PBO

Wikipedia was wrong then, I'll be darned.

I just checked amazon, and found a discontinued (40 dollar) 10 hour variant, but I did also find a reasonably cheap 8 hour tape

You can get even cheaper tapes, $42 for 6.25TB / $17 for 3TB

http://www.amazon.com/HP-Ultrium-6-25TB-Cartridge-C7976A/dp/B00AHQUV3S/ref=pd_cp_e_1/178-4500297-9969555

And it's not even horribly slow, up to 160MB/s transfer rate, the only problem is the drives that read the tapes are prohibitively expensive for home use.

I think you're looking at the wrong thing, they seem dirt cheap according to this link https://www.amazon.com/Sony-Linear-0-85-Inch-Internal-LTX2500G/dp/B00ARHKUZG