Luke James Social Links Navigation Contributor Luke James is a freelance writer and journalist. Although his background is in legal, he has a personal interest in all things tech, especially hardware and microelectronics, and anything regulatory.
Sluggotg How long will data survive on these tapes? Brand new proprietary backup solutions are a risky investment. Zip Drives where great back in the day. But around that time they had a 10 megabyte micro floppy format that some company was pimping. They showed it at trade shows and go lots of press. They showed off the disks and gave approximate prices. Then.. they went under without having an actual working product. Reply
dutty handz Sluggotg said: How long will data survive on these tapes? Brand new proprietary backup solutions are a risky investment. Zip Drives where great back in the day. But around that time they had a 10 megabyte micro floppy format that some company was pimping. They showed it at trade shows and go lots of press. They showed off the disks and gave approximate prices. Then.. they went under without having an actual working product. Please inform yourself before putting out questions easily answered by single word google search or doing straight up bad comparison. Even what you say about Zip is wrong. ZIP never had a 10MB disk, it was 100 or 250MB for ZIP drives, adding 750 at the tailend. ZIP drives and disk had serious reliability issues, leading to class-action suits in late 90s. You would have know that if you'd read a minute instead of spitting lies out. LTO tape techonologies are new, if you consider being developed and commercialized since the 1990s new. One google search away… Also, LTO is an industry joint-effort in maintaining the standard, including HP, IBM and Quantum, all leaders in datacenters offerings ; I know, with such lackluster backing, the datacenter ubiquitous tape tech is one sneeze away from leaving all datacenters in shambles without a solid footing. Your comparison to ZIP, which never had any kind of datacenter presence, is ignorant at best. Iomega (the company behind ZIP or Jazz drives) never had datacenter, high-volume, high-retention market in view ; they targeted the pro-sumer space as a floppy drive successor as an easy way to transfer data in larger volume than what 3.5'' floppies could. You are trying to compare an emerging company (Iomega) emerging product (ZIP drives) to industry giants backed consortiums that developped an open-standard for datacenter backups, ironically during the same times. Iomega never targeted the datacenter, tapes never targeted end-user consumer, or even pro-sumer, they were always targeted at datacenter usage. You know why their business went belly up : USB, with both its performance, largely superior to the parallel port used by most ZIP drives, plug-n-play of devices, including data thumbsticks. The ZIP/Jazz form factor simpy got beat in capacity. portability and easiness of use, right in the middle of its rise in awareness. Iomega tried multiple way to pivot around with ZIP drive on USB, but that merely added a middle-man device whereas with thumbdrives, you'd just plug it in ; the price delta between solution never was able to sway consumers. Reply
Key considerations
- Investor positioning can change fast
- Volatility remains possible near catalysts
- Macro rates and liquidity can dominate flows
Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/storage/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/storage/fujifilm-to-begin-shipping-lto-ultrium-10-40tb-tape-cartridges-in-january-2026#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com
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