why lto ??
why not 8TB qlc ssd ?? cheaper, faster and better for offline / cold storage than lto.
i have used lto-6 for short time...my experience ?? better use big ssd for cold storage
No, no no no no, you really don't want to use QLC SSDs for cold storage. Their powered off data retention time is far too low for that to be a good option. Note that the JEDEC standard for SSDs is that client drives only need to retain data for 1 year when stored at 30C, and enterprise drives only need to retain for 3 months when stored at 40C. Granted those are minimum specs, and some drives probably do far better, but I doubt any QLC drives are among them.
Tape, on the other hand, is one of the few mediums where you can write it today and reasonably expect read it back 30 years later without data corruption. And while tape
drives may be more expensive than a QLC SSD, the tape itself is far cheaper, and if you amortize the cost of the machine over enough tapes, the whole setup will be a lot cheaper than an equivalent capacity of SSDs or even HDDs. IMO tape is basically the ideal storage mechanism for any data you're pretty sure you'll never need again, but you still need to keep, either because you're legally required to for some number of years, or there's a small chance you might need it again someday (e.g. a third level backup).
Tapes - too good to be true? haha. Tapes could only do sequential reads/writes well - any seek process is counted not in ms but in seconds and sometimes minutes. Tapes do fail much more often than hard drives. Tape drives and libraries are both notoriously unreliable due to the high amount of moving parts (usually made from plastics to cut costs)
Don't make assumptions about the back-compatibility of LTO drives.
Tape Drive, Media Compatibility Matrix | Tandberg Data
Good news - there aren't many vendor locks to be aware of, except maybe changing tape drives in the library. Tapes themselves are interchangeable as long as right format/type.
Agreed that tape is slow for anything that's not sequential, but since backups are usually sequential, that's often fine. And if you need to do random access with data on a tape, it's probably best to just sequentially copy the whole tape to some other storage medium and do the random access there.
And while tape
drives may be unreliable, the tape itself is very reliable, and you can replace the drive without losing any data stored on the tapes.