This still isn't looking the most cost-effective. Assuming that out there somewhere is a cheap USB-SCSI dealie and that it's possible to get a good deal on an LTO4 drive; can still buy about ~9TB for the first 800GB tape

I'm not sure tape can win the race, unless bought in bulk

@bertieb Ya, I think I looked a while ago and you'd have to go something like LTO5 or LTO6 to have any hope of overcoming the drive cost. And so I bought a pair (quad now...) of 8TB external drives instead :P

downside, hardware failure means more loss than just a single tape loss

@Bob Aye; there's that

heh. Depends on the flavour of SCSI too

Here at least 3TB still edges out 8TB in the price/GB stakes

(AFAICT)

See, pursuing tape wasn't so much for storage/backup but for actual archiving; keeping unneeded stuff on active spinning rust just feels wrong

@bertieb how is blue ray, price wise?

WORM, sure but ...

When I say 'unneeded', I mean in the 'not right now, maybe someday' sense, not in the /dev/null sense :P

yup

I did that with DVDs back in the day

As did I and it was a paaaaaain

Some of the stuff I would like to archive is potentially >25GB too

@JourneymanGeek the only flavour worth mentioning in the 21st century is SAS :P

well, technically UAS counts

@JourneymanGeek Seems to be literally 0.001 GBP / GB cheaper, if I did my sums right

@Bob there's several different connectors there tho

@bertieb Does it? Ican get an 8TB drive for 200 USD.

Used to be 180 USD but eh

@bertieb though, cheap drive

and can be used for other things

@JourneymanGeek SAS is SAS, no?

@JourneymanGeek Ah, forgot to factor the drive in

@JourneymanGeek last I checked, horrendously expensive -_-

@Bob 0.026 vs 0.030 per gig, according to PCPartpicker

Biggest downside to BD (and DVD etc) is they actually age and die

@bertieb that 200 USD 8 TB comes to 0.025 USD/GB

There's that

I think it was actually the 5 TB ones that came out slightly cheaper

talking about external drives, though

@Bob Yeah but Sterling aint what it used to be

@JourneymanGeek you know, my desktop has a BD-RE drive I've had for 6 years. It has never touched a BD of any description

(would be my guess; drives feel more expensive certainly)

Seems to be around 230 for 8TB vs 75ish for 3TB

I could import I guess

But I'm not sure how welcome a crate of hard drives would be as hand luggage, given recent restrictions

:P

@bertieb @JourneymanGeek ooh, found one. 200 AUD for the "SAS controller" :P

ebay.com.au/itm/…

For archiving/offlining purposes, I'd probably need ≥ 60 BRs

Xeon 5060s are hilariously bad but they'd work fine as a (hot/inefficient) storage server

"May not post to United Kingdom"... no kidding! :P

@bertieb free shipping locally, you could probably find something similar

oh wait that's a local pickup

vic.. bleh. prolly one in nsw somewhere

Just the cost of a plane fare :D

> 2x Intel Xeon 5060 CPU 3.2GHz (One CPU Slot broken but CPU OK)

lol what

how do you break a CPU slot

> A true powerhouse in every sense, the Dell Precision 690 is an enterprise class workstation capable of scaling great heights in high end computing environments.

*giggles*

> System also comes with two 160GB powerful hard drives

> one FireGL V3800 3D Graphics Card for all your graphics design applications and more

The Dell dealie I have does SAS I'm sure, but 1) I couldn't find a reasonable sized/priced drive to go with it when I looked $n years ago 2) power consumption 3) when on it sounds akin to living under Heathrow flight path 4) it's big, like cargo freighter is big 5) did I mention it's loud and eats watts?

way to make a 2008 $200 shitbox sound awesome

Oh also 6) it doesn't exactly work, if you want to get technical

Arg... anyone willing to talk me through an algorithm?

> With ... up to 16 DDR2 RAM slots ... this is a machine limited only by your imagination.

My imagination includes the 32 GB of DDR4 I currently have, and the 64 GB possible :P

0_0

@KronoS Sure!

I CAN IMAGINE QUITE A BIT!

OTOH, it's probably good for at least one obscure hardware-troubleshooting problem, and they're always popular

@Bob done that once.

Might be a sled

@JourneymanGeek ?

ha this one's slightly less ancient ebay.com.au/itm/Dell-Precision-T7500-Tower-Workstation-/…

@bertieb It's much cheaper to just buy the PCIe card though ebay.com.au/itm/…

@Bob hang on... I'm trying to get a room we can use without cluttering this one up beyond the clutter it already is ;)

@KronoS Clutter? Hey, I resemble that remark!

@KronoS eh, it's looking like we've just run out of things to talk about, soooooo :P

oh clippy... you so funny

imgur.com/a/XGx8E

let's discuss here

What's going on here?