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Anyone still using RDX cartridge drives for air gapped backups? That’s been part of our strategy forever, I’m considering moving to some higher-capacity RDX drives, but curious how everyone is leaning these days? I could buy 3 external HDDs of the same capacity for the price of one RDX cartridge, but not sure if it’s worth the tradeoff where simplicity is concerned.

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I was still using them at my old job. We had an iSCSI RDX library. I think they were 2 or 4 TB disks.
Would back up and eject the cartridge just in case.

We’d reload the library on Mondays and Fridays. Less effort than rotating removable hard drives.

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A little late, but I’m sure by now you know RDX Tantung is out of businesses. Any inventory still left there will be gone fast. That’s sad because I loved the cost effective, reliable solution, finally putting tape behind us. I mean we have RDX drives over 10 years still 100% functioning. And since we change one every day, I only need to worry about the enclosures themselves, which were generally around $200.00, cheap by any standard. We did have one internal SATA drive die, it would no longer eject, so I just disconnected it, left it in there, and replaced it with a USB 3 external, which worked just as well with the same data drives. I’m reading about LTO, but holly smoke they’re expensive! I’m gonna miss RDX, the perfect SMB solution. What will you guys be moving to? Any suggestions welcomed.

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LTO is more expensive but at a higher capacity. LTO 8 is 12TB uncompressed and LTO 9 is 16TB uncompressed. Once you get over the drive cost the tapes are under $100. If you don’t need that capacity however, then it can be a problem but you could just go with an external HDD as you mentioned. You have to be careful with storing external flash drives long term without power though.

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We’re still using our existing RDX fleet, was just hoping to expand into larger drives. The current ones work just fine for our existing jobs, but if I had some ideas that would require at least double the current size. Dell quoted the 4TB model at $450, but that’s a steep price for the RDX convenience. In the end, 22TB external drive for $250 was too hard to pass up…