This 9TB tape shows why magnetic can still be better than SSD or hard drives

Music tapes will bring back warm, fuzzy memories to those born in the early 1980s, but magnetic ribbons have long been replaced by shiny coasters, silicon chips and cloud storage for anyone wanting to store data.

But thetechnology is not dead yet - you can buy cheap LTO-7 tapes and get 9TB of native storage (22.5TB compressed) once they are reformatted to M8, such as the Quantum LTO-7 tape for as little as $57.77.

With an uncompressed capacity of 9TB, this translates into a per TB cost of $6.42, about 12x less than the cheapest SSD on the market and 1/4 the price of the 12TB Seagate Exos X14, currently the most affordable hard disk drive on the market on a per TB basis.

Also check out the best portable SSD of 2020
Looking for something more durable? These are the best rugged hard drives of 2020
We highlighted the best cloud storage solutions

Capacity

In other words, if you want a LOT of capacity, nothing beats the good old magnetic tape - although you will need to factor in the cost of the drive.

There's something else that tape provides that no other storage medium currently offers by default; on-the-fly, transparent compression which can go up to 2.5:1; although this works best on text files rather than on multimedia ones, as they are already heavily compressed.

As for transfer speeds, they can reach 300MBps (that's a staggering 1.08TB per hour) which is plenty fast, slower than the PNY Pro Elite which tops 375MBps.

Even though tape has a retro feeling to it, it is still the preferred, most widely used archiving medium thanks partly to a 30-year archival life and lifetime warranty on almost all tapes on sale.

Just bear in mind that the price above doesn't take into consideration the price of an LTO drive, which can cost around $2,600 (e.g. t his Quantum LTO-7 drive) for a bare internal drive so that it only makes sense to get this if you plan any capacity above 100TB.