Backup Tapes Come Back To The Homelab

October 12, 2026 by Tyler August 37 Comments

It’s one of the great mysteries of computing, how somehow in the Year Of OLlama 2026, tape remains the god of cheap storage. A while back [Ben Pettis] recounted his experience setting up an LTO-5 tape drive in his homelab, an experience which only becomes more relevant as hard drive prices stay high.

LTO-5 is already well out of date in the professional world, after all– a new server install would be debating the merits of LTO-9 versus LTO-10, but for the homelab it’s a matter of what’s affordable on the used market with decently-sized cartridges. If you can live with 1.5 TB of uncompressed data on a roughly palm-sized Linear Tape, Open cartridge then LTO-5 could be good enough. Yes, the tapes are advertized as 3TB, but that’s assuming a 2:1 compression ratio on the data, which you’re not likely to get on the photos and video that make up much of a data horder’s storage. That’s one thing [Ben] was quick to clear up for us. He also detailed his adventures with the cheaper-to-buy fiber channel model of drive.

The label would have you believe this box stores 30 TB.

Tape drives usually come with an SAS or fiber channel interface– fiber channel being, you guessed it, an optical solution unlike the SCSI-like SAS connection you may be familiar with for block storage devices. With a PCIe adapter it’s not hard to set up, provided you get the cables the right way around! That’s another detail we’re glad [Ben] shared so we can find it again if we have the same problem: with no switch in the circuit, you need a crossover cable to bring TX to RX. Which is obvious in retrospect, but obscure to those of us just learning about the standard.

The advantage, as [Ben] makes clear and everyone has always known is simply price. As of this writing, diskprices.com has 16$/TB as the lowest cost, while [Ben] was able to pick up lightly-used tapes on eBay for only 2$/TB. If you have a lot of data, those savings amortize the drive costs relatively quickly, since a used drive like [Ben]’s can be had for a few hundred bucks.

Is it the ultimate solution for our data storage woes? That depends on your needs, but perhaps not considering we get as many tips on storing data on reel-to-reel as we do on LTO. We even saw a tape-loading robot repurposed to serve bar one time.

Music Is Back On Optical Disk In This Plex Server

August 7, 2026 by Tyler August 23 Comments

Given that the no doubt totally sustainable build-out of data centers has sent both solid state and magnetic hard drive prices soaring, though, [WNY Over The Air] decided to take a look back at optical disks — specifically the high-density BDXL disks — and see how they do hosting the music library for his Plex server, among other things.

Price wise, well, it’s going to vary depending where you are in the world and exactly when you look. But Blu-ray pricing is looking competitive to hard drives again, and that even goes for the long-lasting, archival-quality “M-disks” that are supposed to last 1000 years in ideal conditions. Of course if you’re playing with LLM Agents, having your precious data on a Write Once Read Many medium like Blu-ray also has the advantage of keeping the agent from wiping it out, which [WNY] takes pains to point out.

That might be obvious, but what’s less obvious is that once the disk has had its metadata queued by his media-streaming Plex server the M-disk is plenty fast enough for streaming music with no noticeable lag. That load time does happen every time you load in a fresh disk, but how often would you be swapping out 100 GB of songs? Even with lossless formats like FLAC, that’s a few thousand tracks. If you’ve already got a Blu-ray drive and are hard up for storage, it might make sense right now to move your music to an optical disk while waiting for drive pries to normalize.

The window where this makes financial sense might not last long, and we’ll be back to wondering where to store our data. All we can say is that’s probably not going to be audio tape, as cool as a reel-to-reel would look in the server room.

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With Affordable Storage Options Dwindling, Where To Store Our Data?

April 6, 2026 by Maya Posch 68 Comments

These days our appetite for more data storage is larger than ever, with video files larger, photo resolutions higher, and project files easily zipping past a few hundred MB. At the same time our options for data storage are becoming more and more limited. For the longest time we could count on there always being a newer, roomier, faster, and cheaper form of storage to come along, but those days would seem to be over.

We can look back and laugh at low capacity USB Flash drives of the early 2000s, yet the first storage drive to hit 1 TB capacity did so in 2007, with a Hitachi Deskstar 7k100, only for that level of capacity in PCs to not really be exceeded nineteen years later.

We also had Blu-ray discs (BD) promise to cram the equivalent of dozens of DVDs onto a single BD, with two- and even four-layer BDs storing up to a one-hundred-and-twenty-eight GB. Yet today optical media is dying a slow death as the sole remaining cheap storage option. NAND Flash storage has only increased in price, and the options for those of us who have large cold storage requirements would seem to be decreasing every day.

So what is the economical solution here? Invest in LTO tapes using commercial left-overs, or give up and sign up for Cloud Storage™ for the low-low price of a monthly recurring fee?

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Inside Project Silica, Now On Bakeware

February 27, 2026 by Al Williams 32 Comments

You see it all the time in science fiction: the heroes find old data, read it, and learn how to save the day. But how realistic is that? Forget aliens. Could you read a stack of punch cards or a 9-track tape right now? Probably not, and those are just a handful of decades in the past. Fast forward a few centuries, and punch cards will decay, and tapes will lose their coating. More modern storage is just as bad. It simply isn’t made to last for thousands of years. Microsoft has Project Silica, which aims to store data in quartz glass with a potential lifetime of many thousands of years.

As you might expect, this is a write-once technology. Lasers write the data, and polarization-sensitive microscopes read it back. Electromagnetic fields don’t matter. You can’t accidentally change the data while reading. A square glass platter the size of a DVD can hold about 7 TB of data.

While the program is not a new one, they’ve recently published results using ordinary borosilicate glass (like your Pyrex baking dish is made from) as a storage medium. They say writing is also more efficient, and reading now requires only one camera instead of the three in the original system. The paper identifies birefringent voxel writing, phase voxels, and more.

Obviously, this isn’t for the casual project. But we have to wonder if hackers could do something similar with lower densities, for example. Unlike other methods we’ve seen, no DNA is involved.

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A Friendly Reminder That Your Unpowered SSDs Are Probably Losing Data

November 26, 2025 by Zoe Skyforest 49 Comments

Save a bunch of files on a good ol’ magnetic hard drive, leave it in a box, and they’ll probably still be there a couple of decades later. The lubricants might have all solidified and the heads jammed in place, but if you can get things moving, you’ll still have your data. As explained over at [XDA Developers], though, SSDs can’t really offer the same longevity.

It all comes down to power. SSDs are considered non-volatile storage—in that they hold on to data even when power is removed. However, they can only do so for a rather limited amount of time. This is because of the way NAND flash storage works. It involves trapping a charge in a floating gate transistor to store a single bit of data. You can power down an SSD, and the trapped charge in all the NAND flash transistors will happily stay put. But over longer periods of time, from months to years, that charge can leak out. When this happens, data is lost.

Depending on your particular SSD, and the variety of NAND flash it uses (TLC, QLC, etc), the safe storage time may be anywhere from a few months to a few years. The process takes place faster at higher temperatures, too, so if you store your drives in a warm area, you could see surprisingly rapid loss.

Ultimately, it’s worth checking your drive specs and planning accordingly. Going on a two-week holiday? Your PC will probably be just fine switched off. Going to prison for three to five years with only a slim chance of parole? Maybe back up to a hard drive first, or have your cousin switch your machine on now and then for safety’s sake.

On a vaguely related note, we’ve even seen SSDs that can self-destruct on purpose. If you’ve got the low down on other neat solid-state stories, don’t hesitate to notify the tipsline.

Copying Commodore Data Tapes, 40 Years Late

February 28, 2025 by Bryan Cockfield 41 Comments

Unless you handle the backups for a large corporation, bank, or government entity, you likely haven’t stored much data to tape recently. But magnetic storage used to be fairly mainstream back in the 1980s for all kinds of computer programs. Plenty of computers used standard cassette tapes for this too but you couldn’t just copy them with standard audio equipment. You’d need something like this 1560 datasette from [Jan].

The core problem with using Hi-Fi equipment to copy tapes storing data instead of audio is that data tapes need to be much more precise in order to avoid losses that might not be noticeable in an audio recording. In the 80s computer companies like Commodore built tape drives specifically for their computers, so [Jan]’s project uses two of these 1530 drives to build this “1560” datasette. (No working 1530 hardware was harmed in this build.) An inverter circuit in one tape deck is used to provide the signal to write the data to the other tape, reliably copying data from these data tapes in a way Hi-Fi never could.

[Jan] does lament not having something like this back in the 80s when the Commodore was in its heyday, but there’s still a dedicated retrocomputing scene for these machines that will get plenty of use out of projects like this. If you need to go the other direction in time, there are also interfaces that allow data tapes from old Commodores to be read by modern computers with USB.

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A Modem As A Cassette Interface

January 24, 2025 by Jenny List 20 Comments

At least some in the audience will at some time in the distant past have loaded or saved a program on cassette, with an 8-bit home computer. The machine would encode binary as a series of tones which could be recorded to the tape and then later retrieved. If you consider the last sentence you’ll quickly realize that it’s not too far away from what a modem does, so can a modem record to cassette and decode it back afterwards? [Jesse T] set out to give it a try, and as it turns out, yes you can.

The modem talks and listens to the cassette recorder via circuitry that provides some signal conditioning and amplification, as well as making a dial tone such that the modem thinks it’s talking to a real phone line. An Arduino steps in as dial tone creator.

Of course, this is hardly a viable solution to 21st century data storage need, but that’s hardly the point as it’s a cool hack. We like it, and oddly we’ve seen a similar technique used with a retrocomputer in the past.

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