Hard Drives as Backup Media?

rootus-rootus asks: "I funny thought struck me as I was going over the life expectancy for tape media for backups... Since the size of 3.5" hard disks is surpassing 100GB in a reasonably inexpensive package, has anyone thought of using them as backup media, as in a jukebox or autoloader? The access times and data transfer rate for data stored on them would make backing up databases, etc. MUCH more palatable (200+GB takes a LONG time to dump to tape for a full backup) Any thoughts on the matter?" Bet you've thought about this question before, haven't you? Has anyone done anything like this? If so, how well did it work?

Comments

Re:Not good

[Liquor]

It's been thought of, and rejected

But it was rejected back when the cost of the mechanism was far higher that of the media alone. This suggestion is that the 'Media' IS the mechanism.

When the cost of a TB of storage on IDE hard drives is lower than the cost of a TB of tape media (at least when you include the amortized cost of the tape drive - though it's becoming true without that nowadays) then "if your drive stops spinning, but your data is fine" winds up in the same category as any other tape failure.

And I've yet to see a tape drive mechanism failure that didn't manage to corrupt (or even destroy) a tape.

And in my experience, bad tapes are even more likely than failed hard drives.