Would you be interested in a mini-LTO drive?

2026-07-05 20:04 UTC

LTO drives are pretty cost effective for huge archivals, but given the recent developments with everything being so expensive. Would you be interested in a miniaturized format of LTO? Something like a Data8 cartridge, in a shell with magent protection, so you can have a singular terabyte or less in a safe and portable size. I could imagine it running in two modes, fast or slow, with varying storage capacities, based on use case. Maybe 256 MBps slow, and 512MBps fast, just throwing a number out there. I can imagine some use cases: PS6 physical games (as installation disks) Backup format for power users (instead of a full fledged LTO drive) Recording equipment (music, video) Became you like the noise Because you want to have cassette futurism

Replies (7)

@MxRemy@piefed.social 2026-07-05 20:32

That sounds awesome actually, hell yeah

Open ##3612211
@solrize@lemmy.ml 2026-07-05 21:49

Um obviously it will depend on the cost, and tape in general these days is seen as an enterprise thing with prices to match. Are you going to make a tape drive? 1TB isn’t that interesting since you can get LTO-5 or LTO-6 (1.5TB or 2.5TB native) fairly affordably these days. The physical size of the cartridge isn’t that important for most of us.

Open ##3613326
@hexagonwin@lemmy.today 2026-07-05 23:30

anything would be nice really, but the cost is much more important than size imo

Open ##3614815
@MalReynolds@slrpnk.net 2026-07-06 00:00

Honestly, the world is crying out for a new consumer offline backup media, hasn’t been anything since BluRay. Even just whacking a USB3 onto LTO5/6 and not having it cost the earth for drive or media would sell like hot cakes. Something a lot nicer is cooking in China (Microsoft has been sitting on it as Project Silica for years now. That looks to be a 360TB CD sized disc good for 10000+ years cold storage, currently $30K writer and $6K reader, but that was the case with CDs too. I can see why our corpo lords and masters wouldn’t want us having a device that let us fit all of Netflix in the palm of our hands, but whoever mass produced it and brought the price down to reasonable would make an absolute fortune. Here’s hoping the latter greed wins out, it doesn’t seem like the drives are made with any sort of unobtianium. A new era of CD burners would be highly welcome.

Open ##3615150
@HiddenLayer555@lemmy.ml 2026-07-06 09:45

ONLY if it’s an open standard anyone can make readers and tape for. Especially not a fan of getting fucked over when the company randomly decides to discontinue the product line when the whole point of the product is long term data archival.

Open ##3624461
@pineapple@lemmy.ml 2026-07-06 10:41

I get scared by cold storage since you never know when it dies. After 20 years and finding that thing you wanted who knows if it’s kicked the bucket by then?

Open ##3625537
@daggermoon@piefed.world 2026-07-08 09:41

That would be a dream come true.

Open ##3668884