LTO tape storage costs $2 per terabyte on the used eBay market. Hard drives bottom out at $16 per TB on diskprices.com today. That gap is why Ben Pettis built an LTO-5 tape setup in his homelab, and why his writeup matters more now than when he published it.
The real numbers cut through the marketing fast: LTO-5 cartridges are advertised at 3 TB but deliver 1.5 TB uncompressed. The 2:1 compression ratio printed on the box assumes text and database files, not the photos and video that fill most home storage. Pettis also ran a fiber channel drive instead of SAS, cheaper to buy used but with one critical gotcha: no switch in the circuit means you need a crossover cable to bridge TX to RX. That single detail will save someone hours.
Read the full piece for the fiber channel PCIe adapter setup, the real cost breakdown once drive hardware is amortized, and Pettis's honest accounting of where tape fails. LTO-9 and LTO-10 dominate new enterprise installs, but the used LTO-5 market is what homelab budgets can actually touch. The economics are not going away.
[READ ORIGINAL →]