- Shiny discs were supposed to kill boring magnetic tape once and for all
- But cheap storage all but killed the media for data hoarders
- Tape remains the only true viable long-term solution but drives are far too expensive
It’s 2025 and after almost 20 years, Sony has announced that it is ending Blu-ray media production as well as MiniDiscs, MiniDiscs data and miniDV tape, a few months after it got rid of its 5.5TB Optical Disc Archive cartridge.
I’d be quick to say that this is almost certainly is for blank media as opposed to pressed media (as in 4K Bluray movies and console games) since streaming, for all its convenience, doesn’t quite match physical media when it comes to quality and convenience.
There are still plenty of Blu-ray media vendors around; a quick look on Amazon brings up familiar names such as Verbatim, Smartbuy, Ridata but I think that the writing is on the wall for Blu-ray with dwindling demand and the allure of alternative storage (external hard drives, portable hard drives, portable SSDs). Shiny disks are done and dusted, with no apparent heir to the throne (despite what we have written in the past).
In addition, optical disc will deteriorate over time; the Canadian Conservation Institute estimates that BD-R have an average longevity between 5 and 10 years old which can’t be good news for those that have used write-only Blu-ray disks. In reality, it will very much depend on a lot of other factors like humidity, heat, storing conditions, dye quality etc.
As for the future of on-premise data storage, of the remaining candidates, tape is the one most likely to survive and thrive. Hard drives are great for low hundreds Terabytes and the use of helium means that at some point in the future, helium-based HDDs will become unusable. Western Digital says that the helium “remains contained within the drive throughout its operational lifespan”, which is usually between 5 and 10 years, about the same as Blu-ray.
A single 18TB LTO-9 cartridge, retailing for $88, can replace 720 25GB Blu-ray disks, a bundle that costs $288 on Amazon
Désiré Athow
Solid-state storage is another one but it is still far too expensive for anything above double-digits TB backups. Put aside exotic storage media like glass, silica, ceramic, DNA and holographic, there’s only one tried and trusted media remaining on the market, the grand-daddy of them all, the OG: the old, venerable but still very much alive tape, more specifically LTO (Linear Tape Open). Yes, that very technology that optical drives were supposed to eliminate.
The current generation, LTO-9, delivers 18TB per tape with LTO-10 expected to offer between 24TB and 36TB. Its roadmap, released in 2022, goes up to Gen 14 with a tape capacity of up to 576TB (yes, that’s more than half a Petabyte). Ridiculous? Well, IBM and Fujifilm already demoed such a tape back in … 2020, that’s over four years ago.
Used extensively for long-term cold storage in data centers and enterprises, LTO has the backing of some of the biggest tech companies in the world and is therefore not going away anytime soon. Tape comes with its intrinsic issues: drives are expensive and data stored on a tape can only be accessed linearly. But, on the other hand, LTO media is very cheap, less than $5 per TB, can be stored easily and is durable with a lifespan of up to 30 years.
What I think could cement LTO’s status as the go-to media for data hoarders is an affordable LTO drive. Right now, the cheapest LTO-9 internal drive costs more than $4,300 and is not compatible with the majority of workstations because it uses SAS (Serial-attached SCSI) as physical interface. Adding an external enclosure bumps the price to just over $5,000. We reviewed an LTO-9 drive from OWC back in 2022.
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The hope for a $999 LTO-10 tape drive
Could a sub $1,000 drive change the market dynamics? No, I don’t think so. Large data hoarders, those requiring hundreds of TB worth of storage, are a tiny minority that will almost certainly have the financial clout (or/and incentive/contacts) to purchase an LTO-8 or 9 drive (or an autoloader) should they wish to. So yes, while I would love to have a $999 HPE external LTO-10 drive to use, that has absolutely no chance of happening.
Affordable cloud storage in the low terabyte orbit is the main reason why the total addressable market for low-price on-premise backup has shrunk so much. Blame the likes of BackBlaze (unlimited, $72/year for one computer), iDrive (10TB, $99.50/year), Internxt (5TB, $380 for life). There’s even Geyser Data, a cloud storage service powered by tape (aka TAPAS) at the low, low price of $1.55 per TB per month (100TB would cost $1,860 per year).
Cloud storage though should complement rather than replace on-premise storage as part of a comprehensive backup strategy; just remember that upload/download performance will never match an on-prem solution and for anything bigger than 10TB, prices will rise quickly if you’re planning for the next decade.
