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Scotch Tape Storage
Hoss Man writes "It seems like a few techno-heads out there have figured out how to make a 10Gig harddrive out of a roll of Scotch Tape. It would be cooler if it was Duct Tape, but I guess we can't really complain. " Alright, I'm not sure whether I believe it or not, but it looks pretty darn cool.
need some kind of removable storage.
Now if some agency thinks you have secretly stored some data on your computer, you do not only have to hand over any secret keys, but also tear off any Scotch tape your used anywhere in your home ;-)
Maybe 3M will come out with wider rolls of tape
How about double sided, double density too.
Also, what happens when the adhesive on the tape becomes weak?
You can check the stickyness of the tape by checking if the sticky bit is set to TRUE.
You do a full system backup on a roll of tape. Then you put your tape roll on the desk.
Now, someone who lives with you is just going to *NEED* a piece of tape. They go searching around the house, and viola! There's a NICE FRESH ROLL OF TAPE sitting right there on the computer desk!
Rrrrrrrrrrrip........Snap! (500 MB)
When they're done, they put it back. Then comes the point when you want to restore from backup...
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If you could easily swap out rolls of the tape like cylinders that would be very cheap and very cool.
Disposible harddrives? Use em to wrap your Christmas gifts when your HD goes bad? Recycling takes on new meanings here.
Sure. Although the disks are only purchasable in a single interface (ST506), the scotch tape disk drives turn SCSI after a period of time... just like regular scotch tape.
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CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Oh yeah, and hallelujah for the rant. It is a cool idea though.. think of the use in a James Bond flick... ;)
Jeff
In the late 1970's I read a paper that described the theory behind this. It's cool to see that someone has actually done it. I cannot recall where I read that paper, unfortunately. I was a wild and crazy college student so things like where it was published weren't important to me. I don't think it was in an academic journal, though.
The way this paper did describe the practical potential was in terms of unwound tape. They suggested using the backing medium from magnetic tape, but without the magnetic coating. The proposed mechanism would be to roll the tape past the heads like any tape device, but the heads would be a laser with a high speed rotating mirror that would cause a transversal scanning of the tape. I suspect this thinking was from video tape technology (2 inch quadraplex video tape recording was still common in TV broadcast at that time, EIAJ was getting cheaper, and Beta/VHS was emerging).
There were two interesting aspects of that paper. One was that they suggested a 1/4 inch by 2400 foot reel of tape could eventually hold 10 TERAbits of data (I think DVD has passed this level already, in terms of bits per square mm). The other was that they suggested certain chemical doping of the medium could allow a finite (they suggested 100 times) amount of erasing and rewriting (they didn't detail how that would be done).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I know it is not the same idea, but it reminded me of that episode of "The Secret Life of Machines" where they showed how a tape recorder works by recording their voices on a piece of magic tape with rust sprinkled on it.
Does this mean that if my tape media goes bad I can still use it to tape posters on my wall?
Click here
This is off an idle T1, I just opened the link in composer and saved it so it's just that page.
If this technology takes off, I'd say it's fairly likely that we'd see Tape-RW within several years due to special coating on the disks, or different poly types.
I personally don't see tape storage as making a comeback too extensively - unless we could have say, a 10gb tape and a 100gb tape (that would be one BIG roll!), and use them in the same drive. The possibility of someone packaging something up with it seems too high to me, and even the amount of space that such disks would take up compared to heftier CD-type disks. I think that DVD-RW is more likely to become mainstream, with probable higher densities as time goes on.
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CAIMLAS
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
This may change the balance of the seemingly interminable war between Scotch Tape and Duct Tape.
Chris Hagar
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." - Thomas Jefferson
"Try to think outside the box" ?
Perhaps they found that the tape was kinda like those Postit notes, and they couldn't get data to stick permanently
"Oh, I got me a helmet - I got a beauty!"
"Oh, I got me a helmet - I got a beauty!"
Jack Nicholson, Easy Rider
When word of this gets out IBM, Maxtor, and all those other damn hard drive companies will start marketing 10 gig rolls of scotch tape for about $300, and the deluxe duct tape SCSI models will be pushing the $1000 mark. *Groan*
Seriously, though, this thing could be a very fast WORM system.Assuming they're smart (I think that's reasonable to assume), they will create a system whereby the laser is wide enough to read the entire width of the tape simultaneously. This will effectively make it a "drum", and will eliminate seek time latency, resulting in very fast access times.
It's the same as if your hard drive had a separate head for each cylinder -- there's no arm which has to travel back and forth, so then you only have to worry about rotational latency and normal i/o slowing you down.
However, by the time this thing would ever come to market, if that's even likely, 10GB will probably not be impressive for removable storage, and humans will have evolved far beyond the need for Scotch tape.
This technique is not unlike a 3-D optical storage technology in development by University of Toronto chemist, Eugenia Kumacheva.
In her current research, 1000 GB of data has been sucessfully stored on 1 cm^3 of a special polymer, using a laser to write binary material to the storage medium.
Read more about it here.
LoL duct tape is like Linux, Suited well for some things.. Duct tape does things such as hold sub-sonic aircraft together. Scotch tape on the other hand is suited well to hold gift wrap on a package toghether. See where this is going? Anyways you can use duct Tape for things like holding Radio stations toghether.. ( low budget bastards :p ) You see how this works.. Duct Tape RULES! Scotch tape is for sissies lol.
mount: fs type scotchtfs not supported by kernel
Aha! Then it must be bogus!
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Of course you'd have to invent a time machine as well to jump back to the year 1991 when the USSR still existed.
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The whole point of the original lawsuit was that I needed the time for treatment and to to recover so that I could get back to work. Now it has become an issue of free speech.
As with managing it, I have been working in software development since June 1997. I have been stretching, icing, and taking breaks regularly. I will experience some limits and pain for the next several years, because of the delay in getting the treatment.
As to what this has to do with Slashdot, is that this is something that most slashdot readers are subject too, more than the regular population.
The reason that I posted this information on the site was not to embarass Mattel. Mattel has done a good job of that on their own as you can see from the last few days of news. I have done this to inform others of the condition so they may learn about it without learning about it first hand. That people can learn of their rights and assert them earlier in the process. And, if other companies see what has happended with me, they may learn what not to do. And maybe help their employees with the problem, not tell them to stop playing with themselves.
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Ignore the other one, i forgot break tags. Here it is again, properly:
Drive "3M" is not ready:
Abort, retry, Unroll?
Can't access drive; Unable to find beginning of roll!
Don't become unglued!
Invalid media, insert single-sided tape only!
And the number one user complaint of the future:
"I inserted double-sided tape, and it stuck! I thought I could get twice the storage..."
This
Maybe 3M will come out with wider rolls of tape to fuel the new tape drive market. Also, what happens when the adhesive on the tape becomes weak? Do you lose your data? Can you make your own Scotch Tape HD out of recycled tape? The mind boggles...
Nobody seems to have picked up on the real significance of this form of storage. All conventional forms of storage are limited to only using 2 dimensions for storing data. This new technology is essentially a form of 3 dimensional storage, even though I realize that the roll of tape itself is made from a bunch of "2-D" layers. Even if the tape-drive isn't feasable, then something using the same principles will be. With a bit of research I'm sure manufactures can produce even thiner tapes, and that researches can figure out how to put even more data on each roll. We live in a 3 dimensional world, why not use them all?
I also wonder if it would be ROM or if it would be rewritable and
They state that it's WORM.
RANT>The problem with these stories is that many people read them and don't see that it is only a scientist goofing around.
The use of actual sticky tape is just goofing around I'm certain. Much like the joll-o laser (and the competing vodka laser from the USSR)
Perhaps in a few years, the operating principle can be applied to a usefully stable medium to come up with a really cheap high density WORM. R/W seems unlikely, since the technique seems to involve relaxing of the stress in the backing. I'm not sure if they mean the simple tension from rolling the tape (where the adhesive holds the tension), or the stress on the polymer chains from stretching the backing (probably the latter).
Packing tape as a medium. Want to send some secret files to your friend back in the USSR, write them on packing tape, and use it to wrap the package. He just uses the package reader version to pull the files off the now unrolled tape, but watch out for streaching.
What I like about it is the shear audacity of it. Here is a common product tape and they go and make it into a storage media. Oh, wait it already was a type of storage media. I guess it gives new meaning to binding the bits.
Gives new meaning to "setting the sticky bit"...
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If we could only figure out a way to use fishing line to network the things we would be set!
As shown by this shop selling both Scotch Tape (9th listed) and Tesa Kristallklar (2nd listed)...The Tesa is about 3 times more expensive, but still pretty darned cheap (1.95 DM is about US$0.96) per roll.
I'm guessing Kristallklar probably translates as "Crystal Clear"?
Heat generation during read/write operations is hardly the biggest problem. Lower the entire thing in a vat of liquid ethane.
Adhesive tapes are made by extruding/casting a liqud layer which is dried to make the polymer film. There are so many problems with getting an uniform film using this technique. Inbuilt stresses during drying, edge effects, etc. etc.
This is one reason LCDs are so expensive. If only they can be made like polymer films...
the brand of tape is "tesa Multi-Film, kristallklar" or some shit like that. IT IS NOT SCOTCH TAPE
Buying a Dell computer is equivalent to dropping the soap in a prison shower.
Encode about a hundred thousand copies of css-auth.tar.gz and DeCSS.zip on a roll of tape, then use that roll of tape for your letters, promotions, etc. There's guaranteed to be at least one copy on each section if you write it right, and there are likely hundreds more in case of accidental data loss (read, ripping off and throwing in garbage can).
And better yet, it would be way to expensive for whatever agency was trying to destroy all copies to find which pieces of tape actually contained the code. Of course, the MPAA could just destroy all tape they found, but is that not some kind of criminal act? [evil snicker]
Small nitpick... It's not in fact a hard-drive, it's a write-once medium. Still pretty darn cool, though.
Wouldn't the heat caused by rapid reads and writes actually change the data. also, depending on how colse the tape was to other tape, It could easily expand and contract. I noticed in the article, that the tape they were using was on a slide, preventing it from moving. Although the idea is good, I don't see this ever being used in a real world situation.
perl -e "print(pack('H37','4d65726b7572795a40676e7572642e6e6574'))"
All joking aside, this, in my opinion, is a classic breakthrough in which a 'silly' idea or thought-experiment leads to a minor or perhaps major revolution. The idea of wide, rolled surface for data storage is phenominal. The amount of surface area is MUCH larger than that of a cd-rom or any other flat spining surface, and the amount of movement necessary for a given read is greatly lessened. The idea of three dimensional storage is a tad beyond me, but I can see the potential and it's very exciting.
Before you laugh this off as funny ("it's tape! Huh huh! That's stoopid!") read the page and check out what they're doing. This is big stuff!
With some very sticky implications...
DOH!
**>>BELCH
That ought to fix things right up!
One hermetically sealed clean room.. $750,000
One pen laser $20
One roll of Scotch Tape $3
One more way to piss of the MPAA Priceless
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This story has been doing the rounds for a couple of months allready. Though it is a theoretical possibillity to store data on Scotch tape, it would not be of alot of practical use. There was an Ask Slashdot on Data Obsolescence and Media Decay. Well, Scotch tape would definitely run large risks of media decay. I also wonder if it would be ROM or if it would be rewritable and how often it would be rewritable.
(RANT>The problem with these stories is that many people read them and don't see that it is only a scientist goofing around. It is amazing to see here on Slashdot the reaction research results. People assume that because it has been done in a lab it is therefore possible to do it anytime, any place, anywhere. Fact is, you can't. Most inventions are only proof of concept and need alot of work before they can be used by you or me. Now next time you see a cool invention, understand that it takes at least 2 to 3 years t end up on your desktop.
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...Unable to mount volume "3M", couldn't find damn beginning of roll...
These comments and opinions are mine and mine alone, although they shouldn't be.
You'd be faced with a dilema, fix the printer and lose your 3rd backup of Win95.
Have a paper clip, I need it to make a helicopter.
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Drive "3M" is not ready: Abort, retry, Unroll? Can't access drive; Unable to find beginning of roll! Don't become unglued! Invalid media, insert single-sided tape only! And the number one user complaint of the future: "I inserted double-sided tape, and it stuck! I thought I could get twice the storage..."
This