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IBM and Fuji Announce Tape Storage Breakthrough

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the data-in-a-volkswagon dept.

robkill writes "IBM and Fuji have announced a breakthrough in the amount of data that can be stored on magnetic tape, a 15X improvement to 6.67 billion bits of data per square inch. IBM estimates that it will be 5 years before this hits the mass market"

30 of 254 comments (clear)

  1. Death? by UnixSphere · · Score: 2, Funny

    When will tape die?

    1. Re:Death? by Draconix · · Score: 2, Funny

      When someone walks by with a magnet in their pocket?

      --
      By reading this you acknowledge that you have read it.
    2. Re:Death? by Ryan+Amos · · Score: 5, Insightful

      When a 500 GB hard drive costs $75, can be thrown across the room and have a chance of working, weighs the same as a tape and can be easily inserted/removed in bulk with software management and barcode readers to keep track of it all for you.

      Until then, tape will stick around. I have a feeling it might be a while.

    3. Re:Death? by digitalunity · · Score: 5, Informative

      Which is just as good, the sheer size obtainable using tape drives is just mind boggling.

      On a side note, this article wasn't just light on details, it was shockingly devoid of all technical details as to how this was acheived. At least this article mentions the new density is acheived with a new tape medium coating.

      Sheesh, the linked story might be interesting to stock-market droids, not slashdot readers.

      --
      You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
    4. Re:Death? by TeknoHog · · Score: 3, Insightful
      I'm honestly surprised that the state of optical media has progressed so slowly though. BlueRay and HD may seem very large, but considering the size of our hard drives, I'd be happier if 5 inch CD formfactor media could store on the order of ~100GB.

      There's also some advantage in separating the storage medium from the read/write heads. If either part in a hard drive fails, you're literally fscked (except for some really expensive recovery solutions by Ibas or the like). On the other hand, you can always put an optical disc in a brand new drive. And if a disc is scratched beyond readability in your current drive, chances are you can read it with another drive in the future.

      --
      Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
    5. Re:Death? by dgatwood · · Score: 2, Insightful
      The problem with tape is that the capacity sucks relative to what you're backing up. The biggest tapes (as best I could find in a quick web search) hold 400GB each. The hard drive in my desktop is 500GB. My desktop's drives total 750GB. It would take two full tapes to do a single full backup.

      The industry predicts that with the newer drive head technologies coming out, HD capacity will double every 12 months. This means that:

      1 year: 1 TB
      2 years: 2TB
      3 years: 4 TB
      4 years: 8 TB
      5 years: 16 TB

      So with this new technology, the tape capacity will still have slipped from 80% of the capacity of the largest single drive to 50% of the capacity of the largest single drive. And this ignores things like perpendicular storage, which have the potential to add an order of magnitude to all of those numbers.

      When they said "15x the current capacity," my first thought was "When can I get one?" When they said "5 years," my second thought was "By then, 15x the current capacity will be too small." 400 GB takes 83 square feet. At tape densities, my laptop hard drive would take up half my office.... When are backup storage vendors going to actually get ahead of the density curve instead of lagging decades behind?

      --

      Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.

    6. Re:Death? by zippthorne · · Score: 2, Interesting

      So.. you don't spool your tape? You'd just kind of have it lying around.. flat.. on the floor?

      Who cares about the AREA required. We don't live in flatland. Tape is freaky thin. What is the VOLUME required for all that storage.

      --
      Can you be Even More Awesome?!
    7. Re:Death? by bhiestand · · Score: 2, Interesting
      The biggest tapes (as best I could find in a quick web search) hold 400GB each.

      Let's just say your web search was incomplete. About four years ago I worked for a company that made parts for 1TB tape drives. I know they have at least 8TB tape cartridges developed now. I'm sure the price per byte is more expensive than modern, cheap consumer hard drives, though. Keep in mind you're comparing apples to oranges, and essentially complaining that it's much harder to peel an apple. Companies that need large tape drives for backup need tapes instead of hard drives for a reason.
      --
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  2. That... by remembertomorrow · · Score: 5, Funny

    is a lot of porn.



    What?

    --
    Registered Linux user #421033
  3. Okay. Fine. But.... by blair1q · · Score: 2, Insightful

    How long does it take to write this stuff?

    And how long to seek?

    Because if it isn't faster than swapping old-technology tapes, it's not worth a damn.

  4. What's magnetic tape? by Graboid · · Score: 2, Funny

    I read about it a history book a few years back (right next to zip disks and 8 track players)....

    What's next? Commodore 1024?

  5. Re:No capacity mentioned. by MeanMF · · Score: 5, Informative

    Here's a better article.. They're claiming 8TB before compression on an LTO-sized tape. Tape record smashed with 8 terabyte format

  6. Re:My interest is piqued. But... by eln · · Score: 4, Informative

    You've clearly never worked in an enterprise-level environment. Larger companies like WalMart measure their storage requirements in petabytes. To these companies, the physical space required to store tape backups is significant, especially when you consider some records (such as employee records) have to be kept for up to 30 years after the employee leaves the company. Plus, virtually all accounting records must be kept for a large number of years by law.

  7. leapfrogging by ziegast · · Score: 4, Informative

    FYI: Sony claimed 11 billion bits per square inch quite some time ago.

    It's always good news when someone figures out how to store more bits into the same amount of space, and I'm sure that companies like IBM and Sony will keep pushing the limits.

  8. Re:My interest is piqued. But... by spun · · Score: 2, Informative

    Not everyone is a home user. Corporations far more than 26TB of backup tapes, you should see some of the tape libraries I've worked with. Whole rooms full of tapes with automated robots that load and unload them from banks of machines. As for backup speed, tape is not so slow anymore. LTO3 can do over 100MB/second.

    --
    - None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
  9. Re:No capacity mentioned. by forkazoo · · Score: 4, Informative
    Funny how the article doesn't specifically mention actual storage capacity... Just vague physical dimensions.

    If it's for tape, it depends on how long and wide it is. They give the denisty, so you can compute how much a particular tape size would hold... If it is about 6 Gbits per square inch, and is made into half inch tape that is ten feet long, then it'll be about 60 square inches, which is about 45 GBytes. If it is about 750 feet, which seems pretty realistic, then it'd be something like 3 TBytes per tape.

    I've probably scrwed up the math, but I'm sure you get the idea.
  10. Breakthrough!!!! by HardCase · · Score: 4, Funny

    So if you combine the tape density breakthrough with the Linux device driver breakthrough, can you go faster than the speed of light? Or does SM just need a thesaurus?

    -h-

  11. Drop it by SmallFurryCreature · · Score: 2, Informative
    Lets see wich has a better chance of surviving.

    But don't worry, I am sure you know better then the people at IBM, must be why you make billion and they do not advising the biggest companies in the world.

    --

    MMO Quests are like orgasms:

    You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.

  12. How many years? by Nom+du+Keyboard · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Isn't five years the typical projected time span for something you're not going to see nearly as soon as you think? I remember in five years we're going to have flat-screen televisions you can hang on your wall. And while we do have exactly that now, I first heard this prediction twenty-five years ago!

    And I'm still waiting for the flat-screen TV you unroll like a poster and tack up with some double-sided tape.

    So this IBM announcement fails to excite. Five years is a very long time in the technology industry.

    --
    "It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
  13. Re:No capacity mentioned. by Moofie · · Score: 2, Funny

    I prefer to measure in 747's full of telephone books crashing into LA storage units.

    --
    Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
  14. This sounds EXACTLY like the early days of LTO by csoto · · Score: 5, Informative

    All you naysayers, understand that we had exactly the same sort of announcements before the Linear Tape Open (LTO) standard was developed. IBM led a group of manufacturers to develop a standard built around a few breakthroughs in tape density and drive head technologies. They predicted 10X (or more) capacity, 5X (or more) throughput, etc. and it would be available in 5 years or so. Sure enough, LTO-1 came about and immediately led to a tape storage boom. Quantum pushed DLT to about its limits, Storagetek upped the ante with their very high speed formats, etc. Everything got cheaper. Tape stayed relevant. I predict the very same trend in the near future...

    --
    There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
  15. I wonder, what disk sizes will be in 5 years... by mi · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Currently the cheap and slow large-capacity harddrives are the best deal per gigabyte for data-storage. And they are always on-line. If you want an off-site backup — simply arrange with a like-minded person (or company) to exchange your (encrypted) backups via the internet. A fully automated solution without the daily trips to the safe-deposit box (which is what you are supposed to do with the tapes).

    I wonder, if the disk sizes will keep the dominance in 5 years. They probably will... Or, a major breakthrough in, say, "flash" storage technology will make all other media obsolete...

    --
    In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
  16. Over-priced? by winkydink · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Is the value of your data that cheap? If so, hdd's may be just the thing for you. The three variables in play are for data backup & restore are: Fast, Reliable & Cheap. Pick any two.

    --

    "I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey

  17. Re:Okay. Fine. But.... by misleb · · Score: 3, Informative

    Upgraded YOUR tape drive lately? DDS has to be the slowest "modern" tape formats in existence. I'll never touch one of those drives again. Worthless. Try VXA-2 or M2.

    -matthew

    --
    "THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
  18. Capacity assuming DLT form factor by DanielRavenNest · · Score: 2, Informative

    DLT tape cartridge was 0.5 in x 1700 ft, or 10,000 square inches.
    At 0.75 Gbyte/sq in, that's 7.5 Tbyte per tape. That's a lot.

    Daniel

  19. Re:My interest is piqued. But... by ThurstonMoore · · Score: 2, Informative

    I have a 400GB Seagate SATA hard drive and it gets no where near 100MB/s, what kind of hard drive are you planning on using?

  20. half the battle by NMerriam · · Score: 3, Insightful

    In my experience, the trouble is not in writing lots of data to tape, it's in reading it successfully afterwards. /only half-joking

    --
    Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
  21. Remember Write Rings? 1600 bpi? 800 bpi? 556bpi? by Cliff+Stoll · · Score: 4, Interesting

    In the 1950's, data was recorded on 7-track tapes at 200 bits per inch. Those 7 tracks recorded 6-bit characters (EBCDIC?) with one bit of parity. A 2400 foot tape might hold some 5 million characters (upper case only, please). By the mid 1960's tape densities more than doubled to 556 bpi.

    Sorting algorithms were written to sort information using mag tapes; the speediest would make the tape vibrate in the vacuum columns with a minimum of reel-to-reel motion.

    By the 1970's, most shops changed to 800bpi, 9-track tapes, which would happily handle 8-track encoding. Then came 1600 bits per inch -- you could store an amazing 50 megabytes onto a single tape.

    There was a constant temptation to compress data so as to stuff as much onto the tape as possible. As a result, many graduate students earned their assistantships by decoding tapes written with oddball parity, density, and encoding combinations.

    The scattering matrices from my dissertation are encoded onto 9-track 1600 bpi tapes, carefully stored in my climate uncontrolled attic.

  22. Re:My interest is piqued. But... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    I need it for all the pictures of your mom.

    Yo momma so fat, I need all that storage for just one picture of her.

  23. Re:Okay. Fine. But.... by lukas84 · · Score: 2, Informative

    VXA-2 ist biggest piece of shit technology i've ever encountered.

    We normally use LTO Tapes (mostly 1 and 2), but some customers wanted a "budget" solution. So they got VXA-2 Tapedrives from IBM.

    Some points:

    * They are slow, and i mean real slow. 250-300mb/min slow
    * The tapes look like they are gonna break if i look at them, no comparison to LTO Tapes which look sturdy
    * The loading mechanism sucks, and also look liks it's going to break
    * Two of those VXA-2 Tapedrives actually broke after 2-3 Months in use. Yeah, got replaced in 4 hours, but it sucks nonetheless
    * The tapes are EXPENSIVE. Cost more than an LTO2 Tape without even half the capacity

    Or, in short:

    Never buy VXA-2. Buy LTO1 or LTO2. If you can afford it, LTO3.