This doesn't include the costs for everything else needed, electricity, the other hardware etc etc. Plus, if you want 18tb, you actually need 3 drives: 2 for live use, one as a spare. If any of the live drives dies, you plop in the spare, rebuild the raid, move the data out and change the drives (since it might be impossible to acquire another 18tb drive).
Guys - you're painting the bike shed here. Whether it's a disk or the tape cartridge, if storage costs halve then that means half of everything else (devices, machines, cages, machine rooms, data centers, etc) to store the same bytes, which is ultimately reflected in TCO.
It's not enough to have the data on a drive somewhere - someone has to know which drive and how to access it.
That problem gets harder and harder the more data you have.
Especially as we move away from "everyone in the building can see the archives" style libraries to "Zero trust architectures" where you often can't see even a reasonable portion of the entire data store, only someone with the right credentials and access can.
And this is a challenge right now... I've worked closely with clients that have data lakes that they are struggling to pull value out of because they can't find the data they need, or the data has so many security details (banking) involved that making the decision about giving access to someone requesting data takes WEEKS to resolve)
Essentially - just keeping the data is insufficient. You need the ability to take advantage of it, and that usually costs much more than simple storage.
but we're talking about cost reduction (TCO) and the argument holds: at scale, if you halve the cost-per-bit for storage, then the TCO should drop dramatically and very close to half. The argument isn't about indexing, security, auditing, or whether Hawaiian pizza is an abomination to humanity.
only if the cost-per-bit of storage made up the bulk of the variable costs of backup.
My point is that I don't think that holds. That cost is likely not trivial, but I think the other variable costs make up a large percentage of total costs of a backup (again - because data by itself on a drive in storage somewhere is useless - it's the ability to access and use that data that organizations are paying for)
