Here at PC Gamer, we usually write about blazing fast storage to get your game up and running as quickly as possible. We’re talking about fast SSDs that imperceptibly reduce boot time. In fact, if you want blazing fast speeds, here’s a list of his favorite SSDs. (opens in new tab)If you’re a slow-and-steady strategist, the good news is that tape storage is back with increased sales of old-school media.
You are absolutely right to ask why tape storage will be available to everyone in 2023. Most of us who run PCs for general use certainly aren’t interested in this archaic format.
But with HDD sales declining year on year and Linear Tape Open or LTO on the rise, there are uses for this old, cheap, but much slower technology.
After examining the trend focus data, tom’s hardware (opens in new tab) found that 2022 LTO storage sales increased 14% year-over-year. That’s a whopping 79.3 exabytes of tape storage sold! Of course, HHD is still far ahead and could sell by the zettabyte, but in 2022 he saw a 34% drop in shipments. Sales of tape drives are expected to continue to grow. For those of us who still think of tape as an obsolete medium, these statistics are staggering.
So who is buying all this old-fashioned storage? Last year, tape storage took center stage for its ransomware resistance. This year, we found that most were purchased and used in cloud data centers. Use LTO storage for older archives that you rarely need to access. LTO may be very slow by today’s standards, but if you’re talking about significant data sizes, LTO is one of the much cheaper alternatives.
It also has a longer shelf life than some storage media, making it ideal for archiving. Additionally, you can store a significant amount of data per unit, especially when compared to HDDs. As an added bonus, nostalgia can only be imagined how a room full of these babies would smell.
For most people, an LTO storage solution doesn’t make much sense. I have a horrible amount of data that I really don’t want to access for like 30 years, and it’s hard to see what the purpose is unless you don’t mind the sequential times of reads and writes. But while we may never see his LTO on our own desks, for archival purposes, LTO seems to be here to stay.
