[Info-vax] OT: Has Ask Slashdot reached a hilarious new low-point?

[Michael Kraemer]

In article <5028f1a3$0$13271$4fafbaef at reader2.news.tin.it>, "Mazzini Alessandro"
<mazzinia$$$$@tin.it> writes:
> Drive aside :
> 
> (cost for a 3TB normal hd + cheap usb3 / esata box )  -  cost for a single 
> lto-5 tape
> +
> number of total rewrites of the disk vs limited rewrites of the tape.
 
If it's for longer term storage you wouldn't rewrite much.
 
> If it's purely to move data around because it's quicker than using a wan, 
> the hd would likely win as operating cost, imo
 
Again, depends on purpose.
I don't know what data encoding a USB disk uses, 
probably it will have sort of a filesystem 
(unless you use a plain Unix dd), which means you have to be
sure the recipient at a different space-time coordinate can deal with.
A tape otoh normally contains just a sack full of bytes 
(e.g. a tar archive or similar) which is rather platform agnostic.
 
> Anyway I remember that a lot of years ago, middle 90' at most, there was 
> some program to use a dat as a device to be accessed as an hd. I should 
> likely still have it somewhere...

That's exactly the point, if you used sort of a filesystem on your tape,
you need extra software to read it.
If it's a "labelled tape", some DEC OSs could deal with it out-of-the-box,
via VMS or ltf on Unix. 
If it uses the extra "directory partition" which DDS has just as LTO,
it'll be more challenging I guess.