We got a $5,500 TAPE DRIVE!
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2019-05-06
·
1,586 words · ~7 min read
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Okay, so obviously our devious plan
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to back up our entire petabyte server
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to Google Drive's cheap unlimited tier
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was going to hit a snag at some point.
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And from talking to Wendell over at Level One Text,
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that point seems to be at about 150 terabytes of storage
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when they start throttling you,
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like literally throttling you.
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So fine then, it's okay,
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because we had a backup plan anyway.
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Why store your data in the cloud
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when you can store it on tapes?
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So take off all your clothes.
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This is the MagStore TRB3-HL8,
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a Thunderbolt 3 equipped tape reader
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that even in 2018 costs about 10 times more
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than your mom or dad's hi-fi did back in the 1980s.
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Yes, my friends, this puppy will run you about $6,000
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for the single deck version
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or $9,000 for the single deck version.
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$9,000 for a dually.
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So how on earth does that make any sense?
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Let's start this story by backing up a little bit.
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Ah, I get it.
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So when I was growing up,
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the way to archive data long-term was using optical media.
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So the CD was high on its victory
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over the cassette in the music industry.
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I think I have a CD around here somewhere.
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Oh, yes, optical media, remember that?
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Anyway, CDs were slow and inconvenient to create,
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assuming that you could afford a CD burner at all,
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but their massive capacity meant that compared to floppy disks,
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oh, I have those too, check it out,
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compared to floppy disks and even zip disks,
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you could store what felt like an unlimited amount
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of at least certain types of files.
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Because remember that a 1.44 megabyte floppy,
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minus formatting overhead, could only store like a handful,
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of even basic things like homework assignments.
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Over time though, portable hard drives,
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which have come down in cost dramatically
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over the last decade or two,
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and cloud storage, which is undeniably more convenient
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for small backup jobs,
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have gradually displaced optical media.
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In spite of the booster shots
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that optical disks have gotten along the way,
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like rewritable capabilities,
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the capacity upgrades that DVD and Blu-ray brought,
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there's just a practical limit to how small you can make
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the little bumps on these plastic and foil Frisbees
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before the cost to make them just stops making sense.
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But that doesn't mean that the expensive drive,
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cheap media model is dead at all.
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In fact, all this time, quietly in the background,
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tape storage has been alive and well in the enterprise space
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with even modern supercomputers,
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like the SFU Cedar installation that we toured last year,
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being equipped with
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state-of-the-art tape libraries.
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This product is a little different though.
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So it's the same actual drive
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that you would find in a data center.
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They're actually all made by IBM these days
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and then rebadged.
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So it's LTO8, which means that each of your tapes
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is gonna have a total of 12 terabytes of storage.
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Now, there is this 30 terabytes on here,
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but that assumes that whatever data you're putting on it
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is highly compressible,
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so that would not apply to the kind of media
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that we would be backing up, in fact,
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for most things.
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Very few people use it.
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So 12 terabytes is really what you can count on.
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And then it also means, LTO8,
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that we are compatible with either these LTO8 tapes
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or LTO7.
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Normally, you would get two generations
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of backwards compatibility,
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but there was a materials change to barium ferrite
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that made that impractical this time around.
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All right, so why did they put all this work
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into creating a Thunderbolt 3 enclosure,
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for a tape drive?
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Well, for people like me,
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who have hundreds of terabytes of data,
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but who don't necessarily need lightning-fast access to it.
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So what we're gonna do is give it a try.
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Now, when I first set this up,
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I actually did it on a Windows machine,
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but quite frankly, I wouldn't really recommend that.
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It's not a fantastic experience.
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There's this whole annoying rigmarole to get the drivers,
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installed, you have to disable driver signature enforcement,
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you gotta make some changes in the BIOS.
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It's a real hassle, but once you do get it working,
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assuming that you can find an app that cooperates,
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there are some driver issues on Windows as well,
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it is a lot more painless than it used to be.
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Now, in the old days with tape drives,
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you used to have to take all the files
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that you wanted to archive,
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wrap them up into another type of file
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called a .tar file or a tar ball.
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And then if you wanted to pull anything off of it,
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you had to pull the whole thing off
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and then you could pick out the one file that you needed.
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Now, it's basically drag and drop.
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So whether you're using Finder or Windows Explorer,
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it's a much more seamless experience.
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Let's go ahead and load this puppy in.
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Sound delightfully retro.
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That was so cool.
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Listen to it go.
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So it takes like 30 seconds or so to initialize,
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but we're just gonna enjoy those sounds together.
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So the thing about tape
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is that it has to be read from and written to linearly.
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There's no read-write head that can jump around on the media
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and obviously, unlike solid state storage,
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it can't just grab an address and pull the data directly.
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So you're gonna hear a lot of it reeling and un-reeling tape
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whenever you use the thing.
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So this is a piece of software called MyLTO.
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They have a more advanced version called Pre-Roll Post
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that has a bunch of database features,
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but basically what this is,
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you don't, strictly speaking, need it,
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but what it is is it's a piece of software
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for helping you keep all of your backups organized.
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So in the event that you wanna go back and pull
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like an old news story or something to refer back to it,
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you know exactly where to go, which labeled tape to pull,
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and where exactly in the folder structure you would find
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the files that you're looking for.
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It's gonna take a couple minutes here
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to figure out exactly how much data
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is in this folder on our NAS on the Vault.
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So this is pulling off a petabyte project.
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So this is pulling off a petabyte project.
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So this is pulling off a petabyte project.
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So this is pulling off a petabyte project.
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So this is pulling off a petabyte project.
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So that took about 20 minutes,
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but the bottleneck here is just our network connection
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to the Vault.
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So now we can go ahead and begin.
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So as you get to breaks in files,
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you're gonna hear it kind of rev down,
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but in general, we're able to do anywhere
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from about 150 to 200 and small change megabytes per second.
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from about 150 to 200 and small change megabytes per second.
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And that's over the network.
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You can actually do as much as 300 megabytes per second
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under ideal conditions.
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So if you like me were thinking initially when you saw this,
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well, Thunderbolt 3, 40 gigabit per second,
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like is that kind of an overkill interface for this?
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The answer is actually not as much as you might think.
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So there's still about 15 hours left
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in order to copy about four terabytes of data.
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And I believe it typically quotes this
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in terms of copy time.
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There's also a verification process
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that it has to go through
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that takes almost as long as the initial copy.
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So to be clear,
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it's not like you're gonna be editing video
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off something like this or anything like that.
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Like if you have to grab one file
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that's on one end of the tape
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and then one file that's on the other one,
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the whole thing has to spool through.
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Like it's crazy slow.
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But while there is still a purpose
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to having quick access to a lot of our footage,
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so it's not like the vault is going anywhere.
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So over Thunderbolt with a 10 gigabit network,
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So over Thunderbolt with a 10 gigabit network,
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we can easily back up an entire tape
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over the course of a day.
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And the costs compared to hard drives in Storinators
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start to make a lot of sense
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once you get over about the 100 to 200 terabyte range.
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Add to that that these things are rated
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at a 30 year shelf life,
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compare that to hard drives whose lubrication
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will kind of wear out and seep away,
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causing them to die over time.
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And tape might just be the way forward for us.
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So thanks for watching guys.
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