Sony Tape Storage Breakthrough Could Bring Us 185 TB Cartridges

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Sony Tape Storage Breakthrough Could Bring Us 185 TB Cartridges

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday May 1, 2014 @09:24PM from the pack-it-in dept.

jfruh (300774) writes "Who says tape storage is out of date? Sony researchers have announced a breakthrough in magnetic tape tech that increases the data density per square inch by a factor of 74. The result could be 185 TB tape cartridges. 'By comparison, LTO-6 (Linear Tape-Open), the latest generation of magnetic tape storage, has a density of 2 gigabits per square inch, or 2.5 TB per cartridge uncompressed.'"

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Don't worry, NSA will still buy American by InsultsByThePound · 2014-05-01 21:30 · Score: 0

Sony will turn it into a propietary format, allowing someone else to develop a work around at 1/3 the price.
1. Re:Don't worry, NSA will still buy American by Anonymous Coward · 2014-05-01 21:59 · Score: 0
  
  "Who says tape storage is out of date?
  
  Anyone who isn't rich and isn't a moron.
2. Re:Don't worry, NSA will still buy American by peragrin · 2014-05-02 01:36 · Score: 1
  
  Funny my first thought was the original Star Trek using tape drives 200 years into the future.
  And now it just might be true.
  
  --
  i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
3. Re:Don't worry, NSA will still buy American by ericloewe · 2014-05-02 01:58 · Score: 1
  
  They could be ROM/flash cartridges, like oversized SD cards.
4. Re:Don't worry, NSA will still buy American by Mike+Frett · 2014-05-02 02:17 · Score: 1
  
  Don't forget they'll add crazy DRM that forces you to connect to the Internet before you access your data. Also the drives will be slow to load and you'll have to reboot them every five minutes due to lock-ups. It will also have some wild name like Yello-Drive.
  Toshiba will probably make a competing drive that fails. As a final insult to Sony they will make Drive that "upscales" your current drive without all the annoying issues of the Yello-Drive. It'll do a damn good job too, but; ignorance rules and people won't mind the Yello-Drives slow loading times and ever-evolving, ridiculous DRM.
  In the end the market will show that regular drives still outsell the Yello-Drive 3:1. Sony will probably push for new 400TB (lovingly called 4KTB) models not realizing that most people simply don't care anymore and have moved on to things like Cloud storage.
5. Re:Don't worry, NSA will still buy American by Immerman · 2014-05-02 02:21 · Score: 1
  
  I'm pretty sure I actually saw some giant reel-to-reel machines occasionally. You're going to have to stretch pretty hard to explain why you'd put flash in such a format...
  
  --
  --- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
6. Re:Don't worry, NSA will still buy American by Anonymous Coward · 2014-05-02 03:07 · Score: 0
  
  Wow, this moron thinks tape is dead.
7. Re:Don't worry, NSA will still buy American by Dancindan84 · 2014-05-02 03:14 · Score: 1
  
  Maybe 200 years in the future they managed to make flash memory ultra thin and flexible, and decided to string them end to end to be read or written sequentially? /me stretches
  
  --
  "Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much." - Oscar Wilde
8. Re:Don't worry, NSA will still buy American by donaldm · 2014-05-02 03:22 · Score: 1
  
  Sony will turn it into a propietary format, allowing someone else to develop a work around at 1/3 the price.
  Why would you say that? All they need to do is patent the technology then collect royalties and/or licensing agreements. Not any different to what has been done already in the magnetic tape industry. I suppose you could create a propriety format but we are talking magnetic tape.and any company would be stupid if the tape reader device can't read earlier tapes (assuming LTO type format) to a certain point such as say LTO-7 (assuming) then LTO-6 and LTO-5 although going back further would just increase the price of the reader/writer.
  
  --
  There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
9. Re:Don't worry, NSA will still buy American by wwphx · 2014-05-02 03:48 · Score: 1
  
  4KTB. ROFLMAO!
  
  I'd love an affordable tape backup system that had about 10 TB+, but I'm not going to buy Sony.
  
  --
  When you sympathize with stupidity, you start thinking like an idiot.
10. Re:Don't worry, NSA will still buy American by Captain+Splendid · 2014-05-02 03:56 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Why would you say that? All they need to do is patent the technology then collect royalties and/or licensing agreements.
  
  The joke is that every time Sony's tried that gambit in the past, they failed miserably. Betamax and Minidisc are two great examples of this.
  
  --
  Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
11. Re:Don't worry, NSA will still buy American by ericloewe · 2014-05-02 05:44 · Score: 1
  
  I don't think so. Sure the exterior design is similar, but they don't actually show tape.
  They do call their data storage media tapes, occasionally, though.
12. Re:Don't worry, NSA will still buy American by LurkerXXX · 2014-05-02 07:30 · Score: 1
  
  Then you don't deal with really large data with archival needs.
13. Re:Don't worry, NSA will still buy American by LinuxIsGarbage · 2014-05-02 08:43 · Score: 1
  
  We still talk about "filming" things with our camcorder/digital camera/ phone. Still talk about a compilation of songs from an artist as an "Album", and the save icon in programs is still that of a 3.5" floppy.
14. Re:Don't worry, NSA will still buy American by Anonymous Coward · 2014-05-02 12:50 · Score: 0
  
  Exactly, the equipment is expensive and slow if you need to do any kind of random access, which is like 95% of all necessity for reading and writing to media.
15. Re:Don't worry, NSA will still buy American by Lorens · 2014-05-04 04:59 · Score: 1
  
  Exactly, the equipment is expensive and slow if you need to do any kind of random access, which is like 95% of all necessity for reading and writing to media.
  There's good money in that 5% of that very big and rich market
By way of context... by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · 2014-05-01 21:30 · Score: 4, Interesting

Since this was the first question that came to my mind: apparently HDD platter densities (in similar 'we have demonstrated the technology but don't look for it at Best Buy just yet' stage) are ~ 1 terabit/square inch.

Obviously, the cost of packaging a given number of square inches of HDD platter is markedly higher, so the tape is likely to offer better value(if you are using enough to spread the, generally alarming, cost of the drive(s) and possibly robotic library around a bit); but it's hard to beat the density of a very tightly controlled rigid medium that never leaves a controlled environment during its entire life.
1. Re:By way of context... by Anonymous Coward · 2014-05-01 21:57 · Score: 1
  
  Have you looked at the prices of a tape? In the last 10 years tape is on par on price with disks, and that is exluding the price of a tape deck.
2. Re:By way of context... by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · 2014-05-01 22:08 · Score: 2
  
  Have you looked at the prices of a tape? In the last 10 years tape is on par on price with disks, and that is exluding the price of a tape deck.
  Oh, I was delighted when the stodgy traditionalists finally bowed to the inevitable and let me move all the nearline and less-demanding-I/O to HDD. Tape still seems to be a bit more reliable if you want to just put something on the shelf and then spin it up in 5 years, HDDs can be a bit touchy about that.
3. Re:By way of context... by TheRaven64 · 2014-05-01 22:39 · Score: 1
  
  I've just looked. I can get Quantum MR-L5MQN-01 LTO-5 tapes with a native (uncompressed) capacity for about £20. The sweet spot for disks right now seems to be 3TB at about £80, so that's twice as expensive per TB, but only if you don't include the tape drive. An LTO-5 drive costs about £1,300. To save that much I'd need to be using about 100TB of storage, which is a fairly small filer for a business, but an insane amount for a home user. Shopping around a bit, I can find some LTO-5 drives for about £800, which brings it down to closer to 50TB, but still far more than I need to back up.
  Of course, if I were backing up that much, then I wouldn't want a single drive, I'd want a tape library. And once they're out of the library, tapes are a lot more durable.
  
  --
  I am TheRaven on Soylent News
4. Re:By way of context... by Anonymous Coward · 2014-05-01 23:05 · Score: 1
  
  Internet Archive - Over 10PB
  Facebook - Over 100PB
  Microsoft Over 100PB
  I have 4TB of PSD files, 16TB of home video, 4.5TB dvd of video backups, 7TB of BRD backups, 825GB of family photos, and around 75GB of text documents + one back of all my backups. TB Hard drives add up fast and 150TB tape would be great for me. My family is cam junkies we record HD pretty much around the clock, but hey we have fun doing it. Good memories on video is priceless for me, you can't buy it you have to make it. :)
5. Re:By way of context... by Anonymous Coward · 2014-05-01 23:17 · Score: 1, Funny
  
  16TB of "home video", 825GB of "family photos". Riiiiiiiight.
  That's an impressive collection of porn you've got there. Hope there's none of the stuff that'll have get you in legal trouble.
6. Re:By way of context... by kernel_user · 2014-05-01 23:49 · Score: 1, Insightful
  
  > We record HD pretty much around the clock, So basically you never watch anything. Also, if that happens to be true, all you have is 16TB of *footage*, not 16TB of actual watchable family video. I think it's a kind of hoarding.. You're a hoarder.
7. Re:By way of context... by JustOK · 2014-05-01 23:55 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  Honey, remember this?! It's the video you shot of me shooting videos of our kids when they were first using their cameras! No, wait, that's the video the cat took when you were shooting a video of me shooting videos of our kids when they were first using their cameras. Did you ever feed that cat?
  
  --
  rewriting history since 2109
8. Re:By way of context... by MightyYar · 2014-05-02 00:01 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  There's always a tradeoff between hoarding and becoming a librarian. I could dedicate the next month of my free time to reducing my storage footprint, or I could cough up another $200 to increase my server space a bit. With the exception of running something like Grand Perspective, Space Monger, Baobab, etc. I'd rather just spend a few bucks.
  
  --
  W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
9. Re:By way of context... by GrumpySteen · 2014-05-02 00:08 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Don't forget the 75GB of text documents. Even if they're uncompressed, that's around 30 million pages of text.
  It's the most impressive collection of slash fiction about Kirk and Spock getting it on in the known universe.
10. Re:By way of context... by Anonymous Coward · 2014-05-02 00:23 · Score: 0
  
  I don't have a problem with conspiracy theories except for the fact that, as you pointed out, it is the first thing that comes into the mind of a person that is unqualified to even think about the requirements the rest of us struggle against on a weekly basis.
  If it's any consalation to you, the relavent data points about p ople like you can still fit on a floppy with room to spare.
11. Re:By way of context... by jythie · 2014-05-02 00:28 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  Which is why tape will probably be around for a long time. It is great that HDDs have become more economical for things they are good at, but there will probably never be one solution across the entire range of use cases. Tape has its place.
12. Re:By way of context... by K.+S.+Kyosuke · 2014-05-02 00:39 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Given how large the known universe is, are you surprised? It would take a lot of pages to describe their sex in all those different galaxies.
  
  --
  Ezekiel 23:20
13. Re:By way of context... by Anonymous Coward · 2014-05-02 01:58 · Score: 0
  
  You mean the LTO 5 tape media I can buy for $20, or the LTO 4 tapes for $10? I'd say tape is cheaper by far. The drives are not cheap, and it would be nice to see a consumer level (i.e. can run on usb 2 or 3 without shoe-shining) drive with a capacity similar to LTO-5.
14. Re:By way of context... by stdarg · 2014-05-02 02:06 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  To save that much I'd need to be using about 100TB of storage, which is a fairly small filer for a business, but an insane amount for a home user.
  That's an insane amount for most businesses too! I've helped some small business owning friends out with their computer needs before and they couldn't fill a 1 TB hard drive if they tried. One of them, a veterinarian, said he wanted to keep a copy of his xray images on Amazon S3 as an off-site backup. I thought ok that's going to be a lot of data. Total was around 60 GB for 8 years' worth of xrays. The database backup for his practice management software is about 3 GB compressed.
15. Re:By way of context... by bill_mcgonigle · 2014-05-02 02:18 · Score: 0
  
  if you want to just put something on the shelf and then spin it up in 5 years, HDDs can be a bit touchy about that.
  Any mechanism, really. I wouldn't count on a tape drive to be working in 5 years, but some tape drive will be available to read your tapes. The trick with hard drives is that the data and the mechanism are married (hey, where are the 4TB jazz drives?)
  The thing with hard drives is that these days you don't put them on a shelf - you have them in a monitored RAID array and replace the drives as they fail. Your data will be online for all five of those years.
  There are certainly people who have too much data to keep online - it's just that the percentage is ever-shrinking. It used to be that 90% of computer users needed a tape drive (hey, I even had a QIC-80 when I was in high school) but today it's probably less than 2% and that number keeps shrinking.
  
  --
  My God, it's Full of Source!
  OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
16. Re:By way of context... by Anonymous Coward · 2014-05-02 02:21 · Score: 0
  
  well we have about 1000 LTO-3 800GB tapes here... and we only have ~250 employees
17. Re: By way of context... by Anonymous Coward · 2014-05-02 02:45 · Score: 0
  
  RAID provides zero protection against a building collapse.
18. Re: By way of context... by Anonymous Coward · 2014-05-02 02:51 · Score: 0
  
  Backing up to a RAID does protect you against a building collapse, as long as the backup is in a different building. But I guess your point is that since most tape backups are offline, they can be inside safes instead of computer cases, so maybe they're safer to keep in the same building. Even so, I'd recommend against doing that. Take 'em home. Or shuttle 'em to the "satellite office" or whatever.
19. Re:By way of context... by WuphonsReach · 2014-05-02 02:55 · Score: 2
  
  Any mechanism, really. I wouldn't count on a tape drive to be working in 5 years, but some tape drive will be available to read your tapes.
  
  The problem with that is that at 10pm on a Friday night, after a server failure, when your only tape drive won't read the tape back properly... who do you call? Any tape drive that you order online isn't going to arrive until Tuesday at the earliest and very few local stores carry a $3500 tape drive.
  
  That's why I dislike tape for smaller businesses if you don't have special retention requirements or multi-terabyte backups each week. If you're going to go the tape route, you really need to have a recovery plan where you can get your hands on a replacement tape drive in under an hour. Which means you should be buying at least two or three tape drives when you setup the system so that you have a spare.
  
  And those extra $3500 tape drives sitting on the shelf tend to wipe out any cost-effectiveness that tape has over hard drives.
  
  You can buy an awful lot of 2.5" 1TB USB3 drives for the cost of a single tape drive, let alone 2-3 tape drives.
  
  --
  Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
20. Re:By way of context... by WuphonsReach · 2014-05-02 02:58 · Score: 1
  
  Most small businesses, unless they deal in hundreds of thousands of high-resolution images or hundreds/thousands of audio/video files are not storing 100TB of data, or backing up that much.
  
  Some will have backup needs as small as 50-100GB and most can probably fit all their data onto a single 1TB drive / tape.
  
  --
  Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
21. Re:By way of context... by Anonymous Coward · 2014-05-02 03:38 · Score: 0
  
  RAID does not protect against data corruption.
22. Re:By way of context... by afidel · 2014-05-02 03:43 · Score: 1
  
  LOL, no. LTO is normally about 1/3rd the $/GB of SATA drives and 1/5th the price of NL drives. As an example LTO5 tapes are currently around $20 each when bought in reasonable quantities and hold 1.5TB uncompressed for a cost of $.0133/GB, the cheapest 3TB SATA drive at Newegg right now is $105 for a cost of $.035/GB.
  
  --
  There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
23. Re:By way of context... by afidel · 2014-05-02 03:48 · Score: 2
  
  Our failure rate for LTO is 2 in 12,000 (and one of those was dropped) over the last 10 years.
  
  --
  There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
24. Re:By way of context... by TangoMargarine · 2014-05-02 03:58 · Score: 1
  
  What I'm more curious about is how the hell you end up with 75GB of text documents.
  
  --
  Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
25. Re:By way of context... by TangoMargarine · 2014-05-02 03:59 · Score: 1
  
  But what's the point of recording your entire life if you have no bookmarks to get to the interesting parts?
  
  --
  Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
26. Re:By way of context... by Anonymous Coward · 2014-05-02 04:02 · Score: 0
  
  ...
  The thing with hard drives is that these days you don't put them on a shelf - you have them in a monitored RAID array and replace the drives as they fail. Your data will be online for all five of those years.
  ...
  And for five years you'll be paying for the electricity needed to power them, and the cooling necessary to remove the heat they generate.
  If you have petabytes or more of data you need to keep for years but rarely if ever look at, tape is cheaper.
27. Re:By way of context... by Anonymous Coward · 2014-05-02 04:09 · Score: 0
  
  Honey, remember this?! It's the video you shot of me shooting videos of our kids when they were first using their cameras! No, wait, that's the video the cat took when you were shooting a video of me shooting videos of our kids when they were first using their cameras. Did you ever feed that cat?
  Let me review the videos to find out.
28. Re:By way of context... by houstonbofh · 2014-05-02 04:18 · Score: 1
  
  LOL, no. LTO is normally about 1/3rd the $/GB of SATA drives and 1/5th the price of NL drives. As an example LTO5 tapes are currently around $20 each when bought in reasonable quantities and hold 1.5TB uncompressed for a cost of $.0133/GB, the cheapest 3TB SATA drive at Newegg right now is $105 for a cost of $.035/GB.
  And the drive to read them? Tape is more expensive than disk up to about 50TB when you factor in all the costs.
29. Re:By way of context... by Anonymous Coward · 2014-05-02 04:22 · Score: 0
  
  no it isn't; tape is cheaper; $30 for a 2.5TB LTO5 tape is half the cost of the drive.
30. Re:By way of context... by DarwinSurvivor · 2014-05-02 04:40 · Score: 1
  
  Well, not everyone runs a video rendering farm that generates over 3TB per employee!
31. Re:By way of context... by Carnivore · 2014-05-02 04:43 · Score: 1
  
  Ooh! I also have an anecdote! One of my LTO tapes' leader broke off in the drive, ruining not just the tape but the drive itself. $5k oops.
  It was great for offsite backups, but my data needs have eclipsed LTO's capacity. I don't have the budget to keep upgrading my drives to chase my ever increasing storage needs. On the other hand, I scrounged up a server and a disk array to make a 28TB backup server for no extra cost.
32. Re:By way of context... by fahrbot-bot · 2014-05-02 05:12 · Score: 1
  
  Tape still seems to be a bit more reliable if you want to just put something on the shelf and then spin it up in 5 years, HDDs can be a bit touchy about that.
  Ya, I had a SCSI disk (run 24/7 for 7 years, then off for 3 years) that refused to spin up, but "tapping" on the side it with a screwdriver handle during power up fixed that. :-)
  
  --
  It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
33. Re:By way of context... by afidel · 2014-05-02 05:18 · Score: 1
  
  Are you including power and cooling into the TCO calculation for disk?
  Either way we're backing up around 38TB just for weeklies so it's obviously cheaper for us, and we're a midsized enterprise.
  
  --
  There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
34. Re:By way of context... by afidel · 2014-05-02 05:20 · Score: 2
  
  2 in 12,000 isn't in anecdote, it's data.
  
  --
  There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
35. Re:By way of context... by Anonymous Coward · 2014-05-02 05:40 · Score: 0
  
  Sorry, but one anonymous guy on the Internet saying 2 in 12,000 is an anecdote, it's not data.
36. Re:By way of context... by Anonymous Coward · 2014-05-02 06:16 · Score: 0
  
  Using RAID arrays as a series of backup devices does.
37. Re:By way of context... by Culture20 · 2014-05-02 06:20 · Score: 1
  
  He probably downloaded geocities and wikipedia.
38. Re:By way of context... by MightyYar · 2014-05-02 06:24 · Score: 1
  
  You get some bookmarks for "free". Mainly, date and time are automatically preserved and unless you give all of your files names like "Untitled 1", you get some more context from the name. I'm not really up on the latest in video software, but with stills programs like iPhoto/Aperture even find faces for you.
  Anyway, even if the exercise is pointless, it would still take time and effort to decide what can and can't be thrown away. I personally hate doing that enough that I simply don't throw things away. It actually came in handy recently when I found my old PGP private key on an old hard drive that I had simply imaged to my backup server rather than clean out. Sure, there are hundreds of gigabytes - maybe terabytes of crap that I don't need on there. System files, copies of obsolete programs, videos that I hated the first time I watched them, kids shows that my kids are too old for, and of course raw videos of my kids that no one will ever watch again. But I don't care - it's worth a couple hundred bucks every few years not to deal with it. All you can eat online backup further feeds my addiction. If I'm feeling cheap I'll delete some of the low-hanging fruit, but that's about it.
  
  --
  W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
39. Re:By way of context... by greenwow · 2014-05-02 06:32 · Score: 0
  
  Why was that marked +5 informative when it simply not true? I used to do support for dental billing software, and much of my time was spent helping office managers manage storage. A typical office has piles of external drives because every internal drive on every desktop is slam full. Also, HIPAA(and later HITECH) data retention requirements often conflict with their disaster recovery requirements. When I left, we were just starting to use Amazon S3. but the solution was very complex since you have to encrypt the data at rest, in flight, and blocking incoming traffic by requiring it to be forwarded by an EC2 instance. Our first customer had around 400 TB of data. He was not happy with the $12k monthly bill or the (IIRC) the $15k total fee for the $80/device plus hourly charges for the import. Yes, Amazon charges $80 to plug in a harddrive. His practice was not our largest customer, but it still cost him nearly a quarter of a million per year to manage storage. The US government has really created a need for vast amounts of storage of US companies.
40. Re:By way of context... by Anonymous Coward · 2014-05-02 06:38 · Score: 0
  
  All the best Kirk/Spock slashfic is set outside the known universe.
41. Re:By way of context... by greenwow · 2014-05-02 06:39 · Score: 0
  
  I wish there was an edit feature here. I just noticed the GP was talking about someone that isn’t a doctor and only treats animals. Obviously, the requirements for animals are nonexistent. Since Republicans are disgusting and like animals, they haven’t tried to destroy the animal medicine field like they have human health care. They hate the average person, but their kind loves their dogs. It’s disgusting how much more they care about their worthless animals than they do people. Obviously, records about someone’s property aren’t going to be nearly as large as real medical information.
42. Re:By way of context... by Anonymous Coward · 2014-05-02 07:14 · Score: 0
  
  I have looked at tapes a number of times over the years and in fact hard drives are cheaper per TB than tape media. Seriously, a 1TB hard drive is cheaper than a 1TB (actual) tape. Don't be fooled by the stated capacity of tapes, they are usually giving a compressed amount of data. If you want to follow tape-style marketing then a 3TB hard-drive is actually something like 8 or 9TB.
  Not to mention the price of the tape drives which is one of those "if you have to ask you can't afford it" things. So much so that you could buy a crate full of hard-drives for the price of a single tape drive.
43. Re:By way of context... by MikeBabcock · 2014-05-02 07:26 · Score: 1
  
  For all we know, 11000 of those were never unpackaged.
  
  --
  - Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
44. Re:By way of context... by mattack2 · 2014-05-02 07:52 · Score: 1
  
  There are certainly people who have too much data to keep online - it's just that the percentage is ever-shrinking. It used to be that 90% of computer users needed a tape drive (hey, I even had a QIC-80 when I was in high school) but today it's probably less than 2% and that number keeps shrinking.
  I don't understand that logic.
  I would think exactly the opposite is true -- with people having much more data (yes, mostly media collections), having a "cheap" way to back it up would be very good. I put that in quotes, since I too realized the drive & tapes aren't cheap. (A RAID array isn't cheap either though..)
  Basically, a way to easily back up the media collection. I thought tape drives were that, but apparently they aren't.
45. Re:By way of context... by sjames · 2014-05-02 07:58 · Score: 1
  
  If you're just using the disks to do weeklies, they won't be drawing power most of the time.
46. Re:By way of context... by fnj · 2014-05-02 09:08 · Score: 1
  
  Anecdotal data.
47. Re:By way of context... by radiumsoup · 2014-05-02 09:42 · Score: 1
  
  it's only anecdotal if you have cause to believe he's lying about the facts. He stated his numbers and timeframe, and that's data. It's not something wishy-washy like "since as long as I can remember, we've hardly ever had a failure", which would be anecdotal. Even if you want to stretch it to the point that you require that it be peer reviewed before *you* call it "data", it's still referred to as "data" to the reviewer. Anecdotal evidence is that which is unreliable or untrue due to its basis on opinion and not on facts.
48. Re:By way of context... by Anonymous Coward · 2014-05-02 10:11 · Score: 0
  
  No technical knowledge is as useful as two things. Turn it of and on again, and a properly applied technical tap.
  http://thetechtap.blogspot.com/2009/10/percussive-maintenance-wiki.html
49. Re:By way of context... by TangoMargarine · 2014-05-02 10:22 · Score: 1
  
  It actually came in handy recently when I found my old PGP private key on an old hard drive that I had simply imaged to my backup server rather than clean out.
  Yeah, that's a very good point. I've had to resort to this several times when I accidentally the wrong partition.
  
  --
  Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
50. Re:By way of context... by Anonymous Coward · 2014-05-02 12:57 · Score: 0
  
  So I can data mine it in the future when AI can help me.
51. Re:By way of context... by houstonbofh · 2014-05-03 02:44 · Score: 1
  
  Most office buildings in the US do not charge for power.
52. Re:By way of context... by Anonymous Coward · 2014-05-03 10:19 · Score: 0
  
  Can't you share? $3500/4 is much less than straigh $3500
53. Re:By way of context... by RockDoctor · 2014-05-03 12:08 · Score: 1
  
  The problem with that is that at 10pm on a Friday night, after a server failure, when your only tape drive won't read the tape back properly... who do you call?
  The manager who turned down your requisition for a hot spare tape drive because it wouldn't be necessary.
  
  --
  Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
54. Re:By way of context... by bhiestand · 2014-05-03 22:14 · Score: 1
  
  LOL, no. LTO is normally about 1/3rd the $/GB of SATA drives and 1/5th the price of NL drives. As an example LTO5 tapes are currently around $20 each when bought in reasonable quantities and hold 1.5TB uncompressed for a cost of $.0133/GB, the cheapest 3TB SATA drive at Newegg right now is $105 for a cost of $.035/GB.
  And the drive to read them? Tape is more expensive than disk up to about 50TB when you factor in all the costs.
  That really depends on what kind of storage you're using. Sure, you can do a 100 TB SuperMicro piece of junk for $15k, filled with desktop drives on a cracked Windows server or FreeNAS. But if you want something reliable, you're going to pay a lot more than $0.035/GB.
  On top of that, tape is far easier and cheaper to do off-site. Any quality solution will let you write out 2 copies of each tape so you can send one to Iron Mountain or similar. If you want off-site with disk, you need a second server, second network infrastructure, good links between the two, and good software. rsync is a wonderful tool, but it doesn't cut it for this.
  
  --
  SWM seeks new sig for a brief fling
55. Re:By way of context... by Anonymous Coward · 2014-05-04 10:06 · Score: 0
  
  Oh, I don't know, honey- remember what happened *last* time we let Toonces drive...
Time for a new Sony Walkman Cassette Recorder by Anonymous Coward · 2014-05-01 21:35 · Score: 0

Just wondering, if they can make one with 10.000 rpm to get to all of the 185 TB in reasonable time...
1. Re:Time for a new Sony Walkman Cassette Recorder by flyingfsck · 2014-05-01 22:55 · Score: 1
  
  Maybe Betamax will now be better than MP3?
  
  --
  Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
2. Re:Time for a new Sony Walkman Cassette Recorder by TapeCutter · 2014-05-02 00:50 · Score: 2
  
  My most treasured home movies are on super 8 in the top of the closet, I've got a few hours of 3min films spliced together with stick tape and a razor about 30yrs ago and wound onto 8 inch reels. I get them down every now and then for a "home movie night", my three pre-school grand-daughters get a kick out seeing their mum at their age and love the "antique" (early 80's) reel to reel projector.
  
  --
  And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
But is it even usable? by quantumghost · 2014-05-01 21:40 · Score: 5, Interesting

So at 185TB per tape with the write speed of LTO6 "at speeds up to 400MB/s (1.4TB/hr)" [optimal]....~132 hrs per tape. But in reality 300 MB/s or 1 TB/hr so about 176 hr/tape. 168 hours in a week.....Next weekly back up starts before the first one finished.....
Yeah, I know, they're not all level 0 backups.....you get the idea....sometimes it might be better to have 2 smaller tapes, than 1 large.
1. Re: But is it even usable? by Coligny · 2014-05-01 21:45 · Score: 1
  
  Real men don't make backups... They cry under their desks... (Had a major software raid failure 2 weeks ago... Still recovering around 6Tb of pr0n)
2. Re: But is it even usable? by davidhoude · 2014-05-01 21:51 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  Say what? Everyone here keeps telling me that RAID is backups!
3. Re: But is it even usable? by Anonymous Coward · 2014-05-01 21:53 · Score: 0
  
  Ahhh, there's your first mistake - you don't backup pr0n - the internet is already your pr0n backup.
4. Re:But is it even usable? by rudy_wayne · 2014-05-01 21:57 · Score: 1
  
  185TB
  How many Library of Congresses full of porn is that?
5. Re:But is it even usable? by iCEBaLM · 2014-05-01 21:58 · Score: 1
  
  If the density is greater, the speed will (probably) be greater if the tape pull speed is the same....
6. Re:But is it even usable? by Anonymous Coward · 2014-05-01 21:59 · Score: 0
  
  Where does it say that the new 185TB tapes are written at LTO6 speeds?
  It compares the storage density to LTO6 specs but then also mentions writing to the new tape using sputter deposition.
  Maybe I missed something...
7. Re: But is it even usable? by delt0r · 2014-05-01 22:02 · Score: 1
  
  We have had RAID failure twice now. The idea is that even with things like SMART, the errors in the second disk (or 3rd etc) don't become apparent till you try and recover and thrash the disk properly.
  
  --
  If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
8. Re:But is it even usable? by ArmoredDragon · 2014-05-01 22:02 · Score: 1
  
  I'm trying to figure what you'd want with one of these anyways. I mean, does anybody even use tape anymore to begin with? No random access means recovering from a failure will take a long ass time. It's probably easier to just stick to hot mirrored arrays to begin with.
9. Re: But is it even usable? by Anonymous Coward · 2014-05-01 22:13 · Score: 0
  
  How old are you?
10. Re:But is it even usable? by pablo_max · 2014-05-01 22:30 · Score: 1
  
  It is estimated that the LOC, including video and audio is about 3000 TB. So, you would need 17 of these tapes I guess.
  http://blogs.loc.gov/digitalpr...
  Or was your question rhetorical?
11. Re:But is it even usable? by Lumpy · 2014-05-01 22:31 · Score: 2
  
  It's only the Bohner memorial Porn wing...
  
  --
  Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
12. Re:But is it even usable? by Zocalo · 2014-05-01 22:36 · Score: 1
  
  Or the amount of tape in the cartridge could be smaller. Maybe a return to DAT sized cartridges?
  
  It's probably a horses for courses thing though. There are plenty of applications, particularly in the scientific research arena, that generate vast amounts of data that can be spooled off to tape for archiving/distribution pretty much at leisure before the hot storage is wiped for re-use. Even with Internet2, I could easily imagine somewhere like Arecibo, CERN or the SKA being all over this kind of storage capacity given the old bandwidth of physical media in a truck adage.
  
  --
  UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
13. Re: But is it even usable? by Anonymous Coward · 2014-05-01 22:37 · Score: 1
  
  clearly you don't work with large volumes of data. raid is great, but getting that much data to off site backup is not as easy as it sounds and hard drives don't travel well. Tape has been working hard for years and will for many more. it is also much cheaper to scale than a large array of disks. new tape: $30. New enterprise disk: $300... don't forget it needs to be FIPS so you can take the hard disk off site!
14. Re:But is it even usable? by Anonymous Coward · 2014-05-01 22:39 · Score: 0
  
  What is to stop the next weekly backup happening at the same time?
  Besides, a proper backup system would both:
  1) check the modified dates to see if they need to be backed up
  2) check if they have in fact actually been modified, which 1 fulfils, before backing them up.
  Backing up literally "no changes" wastes space and SO MANY people do it. It is insane.
  1 of these tapes could last me my entire life if I went at the same rate I still do now. 185TB is huge to only store changes to a system.
  Damned holograms making me buy 150 gigawotsit drives.
15. Re:But is it even usable? by TheRaven64 · 2014-05-01 22:43 · Score: 2
  
  You're assuming that you'd want to create a full tape's worth of backups. If you're generating 1.4TB/hour of data, then you might have this problem. If you're only generating a few GB/day then it's quite easy for your weekly backup to run in under an hour and just append to the tape. Periodically you swap over to a new tape.
  
  --
  I am TheRaven on Soylent News
16. Re: But is it even usable? by FireFury03 · 2014-05-01 22:47 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  We have had RAID failure twice now. The idea is that even with things like SMART, the errors in the second disk (or 3rd etc) don't become apparent till you try and recover and thrash the disk properly.
  The other reason why RAID isn't a backup is because it doesn't account for software/human failures - good luck recovering your data from a RAID after accidentally running "rm -rf /", whereas time indexed backups will allow you to go back a few days/weeks/months and recover your data after you discover it's not on the disk any more.
  RAID is there to keep systems running in the event of a hardware failure - its no substitute for a backup.
  Anyway, the errors on the disks should become apparent during their operation because you should be doing regular scrubs to find the errors. Putting the data somewhere, forgetting about it and not actually checking its still there for a few years is a pretty good recipe for disaster no matter how you store it. That said, I've seen a few cases where a drive fails, and the increased load on the other (similar age) disks sends another over the edge soon after, so one disk going bad should probably be an early warning that you're likely to see the other disks start to fail soon too (so don't hang about waiting to replace the dead one!)
  
  --
  http://blog.nexusuk.org
17. Re:But is it even usable? by AmiMoJo · 2014-05-01 23:06 · Score: 2
  
  I wonder if they really mean 185TB or if that is the usual 50% compression ratio marketing wank, in which case it would only take half a week two write.
  
  --
  const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
  SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
18. Re:But is it even usable? by drolli · 2014-05-01 23:09 · Score: 1
  
  My guess: when the technology which increases the data density by a factor of 100 is ready, then also the writing mechanism will be significantly faster.
19. Re: But is it even usable? by Anonymous Coward · 2014-05-01 23:19 · Score: 0
  
  Time to take a look at ZFS or BTRFS. And kudos on being honest about the "6TB of porn" instead of claiming it was "home video" or "family photos"
20. Re:But is it even usable? by Arancaytar · 2014-05-01 23:23 · Score: 2
  
  Yeah, if you really need to back up 180 TB per week, then you should probably save time by writing multiple tapes in parallel. They wouldn't need to be smaller, though - you could still save a lot of storage room by reusing the large tapes.
21. Re: But is it even usable? by Anonymous Coward · 2014-05-01 23:27 · Score: 0
  
  I see you were usin gReiser FS. Have you tried following Hans Reiser around until you find where he hid the old drive bay, and checked it for blood staains?
  I dealt with ReiserFS a lot with a boss who was a big fanboy, and it was *amazing* how it would eliminate files and pretend innocence: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Reiser)
22. Re:But is it even usable? by Anonymous Coward · 2014-05-01 23:31 · Score: 0
  
  Depends on the tape technology. I *still* remember Exabytes, which had no way to just run the tape previously written end because they had no "end-of-tape" marker, only an "end-of-file" marker. Whoever had written the spec for them had decided that putting two "end-of-file" markers in a row to indicate "end-of-tape" was something they didn't need.
23. Re:But is it even usable? by Anonymous Coward · 2014-05-01 23:32 · Score: 0
  
  But in reality 300 MB/s or 1 TB/hr so about 176 hr/tape. 168 hours in a week.....Next weekly back up starts before the first one finished.....
  But you try and tell the young people of today that...
24. Re:But is it even usable? by asvravi · 2014-05-01 23:35 · Score: 1
  
  Periodically you swap over to a new tape.
  Every 180 years to be precise. Your bigger problem would be material rot, assuming you would want anything more than a couple of decades worth of backup.
25. Re: But is it even usable? by Anonymous Coward · 2014-05-01 23:37 · Score: 0
  
  And kudos on being honest about the "6TB of porn" instead of claiming it was "home video" or "family photos"
  And kudos on believing it... who the hell tries to recover 6 TB of porn? Unless it's a "home video".
26. Re:But is it even usable? by flyingfsck · 2014-05-02 00:04 · Score: 1
  
  IMHE tape is always an order of magnitude slower than the advertized speed, so it is likely even worse than what you calculated.
  
  --
  Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
27. Re:But is it even usable? by Anonymous Coward · 2014-05-02 00:18 · Score: 1
  
  I mean, does anybody even use tape anymore to begin with?
  Hard to believe you're even asking this. Just about every large company in existence uses tape extensively.
28. Re:But is it even usable? by jythie · 2014-05-02 00:32 · Score: 1
  
  Depends on how you are doing the backups. Say you only have 1TB of data, you could back it up once per day appending and only need to swap out tapes every 9 months or so.
  
  Though were I see this really being useful (at least to me) is recording scientific data. Experiments can put out obscene amounts of information and I could easily see hooking one of these up to a detector and being happy that you only need to change tapes once a week or so.
29. Re:But is it even usable? by Anonymous Coward · 2014-05-02 00:36 · Score: 0
  
  You're assuming that you'd want to create a full tape's worth of backups. If you're generating 1.4TB/hour of data, then you might have this problem. If you're only generating a few GB/day then it's quite easy for your weekly backup to run in under an hour and just append to the tape. Periodically you swap over to a new tape.
  I see. A few gigabytes at a time you say...
  And you've justified buying that brand-new $100,000 tape drive and a few of those $300 tapes exactly how?
  I guess the point of buying a Ferrari is to not drive around in first gear, not unlike your suggestion of using a few gigabytes at a time on a 185TB-capacity platform.
30. Re:But is it even usable? by Anonymous Coward · 2014-05-02 00:37 · Score: 0
  
  Let's stick some of these tapes in the LOC itself and go recursive!
31. Re: But is it even usable? by K.+S.+Kyosuke · 2014-05-02 00:43 · Score: 1
  
  Better get two desks, then, in case one of them breaks and you'll have to cry under the other one.
  
  --
  Ezekiel 23:20
32. Re:But is it even usable? by jellomizer · 2014-05-02 00:44 · Score: 1
  
  I would expect with a higher density tape, you would get a higher write speed as well.
  The read and write speed of the tape can be electrically increases much easier than speeding up how much tension that a fast rolling tape can handle.
  
  --
  If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
33. Re: But is it even usable? by CastrTroy · 2014-05-02 00:51 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Which is why hard drives are a much better solution than tapes. With tapes, most people write them, put them on a shelf, and hope that the next time they need them they actually work. Every time you read them, you degrade them, so actually checking if they work once in a while could be detrimental. Contrast that with hard disks. Use RAID on the main machine to increase uptime. Then backup everything to a completely seperate RAID array. Disks are a lot better at holding up to continuous use, so you can check frequently for errors in the data, and fix it before it becomes a problem. I don't think cost per gigabyte should actually be a big part of the equation. Everybody always mentions the price of the tape drive, but when talking about hard drives, they fail to account for the cost of a box that can handle 20-40 drives and act as a real backup solution.
  
  --
  
  Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
34. Re: But is it even usable? by labnet · 2014-05-02 00:51 · Score: 1
  
  This is the backup system i eventually settled on.
  First line of defence is is raid 6 running on ssd's on our hyper v server.
  Second is altaro backup backing up our vm's to a nas drive running raid6
  Third is shadow protect which runs on the domain/file server, to provide long term historical backups.
  The altaro backups are copied to an offsite drive once per week.
  
  --
  46137
35. Re:But is it even usable? by alen · 2014-05-02 01:03 · Score: 1
  
  my weekly backups at work are in the 5-6 TB range per week. we have LTO-4 in a 96 slot tape robot with 3 drives
  185TB per tape means i can have most of my tapes last all year and just switch one out monthly to send offsite. or instead of sending monthly backups offsite, i can fill the tape with weekly backups and send the same one tape offsite but with 10 times the data
36. Re: But is it even usable? by sandytaru · 2014-05-02 01:09 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  Most tapes are written and then rewritten on a weekly or monthly basis. The medical office that was using LTO would have a daily incremental backup and then a once a week full backup. The software would run a verification check on each tape and give us a warning when it determined one was degrading.
  
  Tapes saved our ass when the motherboard blew out on their main server and took out the RAID to boot. We were able to retrieve the data from backup without any problem.
  
  --
  Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
37. Re:But is it even usable? by Anonymous Coward · 2014-05-02 01:19 · Score: 0
  
  > I guess the point of buying a Ferrari is to not drive around in first gear
  As my dad told me: You don't buy a Ferrari because you *can*, you buy a Ferrari to show other people that they *can't*.
38. Re:But is it even usable? by Eric+Sharkey · 2014-05-02 01:52 · Score: 1
  
  185TB is the uncompressed size, as noted in the last word of the summary.
39. Re: But is it even usable? by bws111 · 2014-05-02 02:04 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  You have no idea what you are talking about. Most tapes are not written by people and put on a shelf. Most tapes are automatically managed by a tape library, such as this one (note that thing can store up to 900PB.) Read failures do not happen, because the library and host software together automatically count cycles and copy to a different tape when the cycles get too high, as well as detecting corrected errors and signalling when there is a problem with a tape.
  z/OS, for instance, has a hierarchical storage manager where, by policy, data that is not accessed in certain period of time is moved first to slower (cheaper) disk, then to tape. Where I work, the 'to tape' time is about a month. In over 30 years of using such systems I have seen the 'DFHSM is recalling from tape' message many thousands of times, and I have never once encountered a situation where the recall failed or the data was corrupted. And the recall typically takes less than a minute.
  It seems that most people on here only have experience with crappy home tape systems.
  So let's do your contrasting with HDDs. That library holds up to 900PB, and uses 1.6kVA of power. It takes up 163 square feet of floor space. By my calculation, that would take over 1 million 1TB HDDs in a RAID array. How much floor space would that take? How much power would it use? How much heat would be generated?
  If you have a lot of data, and do not need all of the data 'right this second', and (most importantly) have a system that can manage the data without causing the user to jump through hoops, tape makes an excellent solution. And that describes most large companies.
40. Re: But is it even usable? by Anonymous Coward · 2014-05-02 02:12 · Score: 0
  
  About ten years ago, I worked at a place that did a trial run of disks as backup, running an old tape autochanger in parallel for critical things. Things were looking good enough to toss the autochanger until a drive controller failure caused garbage data to be written to the platters, which hosed all the logical drives.
  A drive controller freaking out is the exception than the rule, but with disk, all your storage is online, or at most just a drive spin-up away. It doesn't take much to overwrite it, or at least zero out the drives, forcing a recovery by hand (which could be impossible.)
41. Re:But is it even usable? by Anonymous Coward · 2014-05-02 02:13 · Score: 0
  
  Yeah, if you really need to back up 180 TB per week, then you should probably save time by writing multiple tapes in parallel. They wouldn't need to be smaller, though - you could still save a lot of storage room by reusing the large tapes.
  Sounds like RAIT!
42. Re:But is it even usable? by Daniel+Boisvert · 2014-05-02 02:23 · Score: 1
  
  IMHE tape is always an order of magnitude slower than the advertized speed, so it is likely even worse than what you calculated.
  If your tapes are writing that slowly, something is wrong, and I'd be worried about shoe-shining. Without putting much effort into it, my LTO5 jobs currently run at around 125-135MB/s. With modern tape, it helps a lot to stage to disk first, or get software that can multiplex backup streams to keep the tape buffers fed.
43. Re: But is it even usable? by mlts · 2014-05-02 02:31 · Score: 1
  
  The best solution is not just disks, not just tapes, but a multi-pronged solution.
  For example, most drive arrays can replicate asynchronously via a WAN link. This provides protection against drive failure, but provides no protection against deliberate destruction of data.
  One useful tool is D2D2T. Have all the machine data hit a landing zone that is deduplicated. Then, depending on how critical the box is, have that machine's data sent to two sets of tape for long term storage, or just let the machine's data expire on the disk array (for example, a dev machine or a QA box where all one needs is a month at most.) Part of this procedure is a check every so often to suck in a backup set and verify the data on it.
  Tape, disk, and cloud storage are all different media types. None of them will magically fix a problem. It takes being able to use what media for the task at hand. D2D2T addresses a lot of issues with tape, including having the availability of backups quite fast if a restore is needed, while having media able to be transported to the nearest Iron Maiden warehouse just in case of a disaster, coupled with an archive of files kept on WORM media to keep the IRS and other regulators happy.
  In my experience, tapes are extremely reliable, especially LTO tapes. I've used tens of thousands of tapes in one job, and I have had only a couple tapes fail in that time, and their failure mode were soft (correctable) media errors, and not hard (data is gone) errors.
  I do wish Sony or someone would make a consumer level tape drive. Tape isn't stylish, but it does the job quietly and effectively.
44. Re:But is it even usable? by JWW · 2014-05-02 02:39 · Score: 1
  
  Initially I thought that might not be true because tape will still be linear and you would still need to move it past the read heads.
  But, if you work to make the read heads (and the tape) wider you could still have the same velocity of tape, but write more data (on top of the more data you're writing because of density increases) and actually achieve very good throughput.
45. Re: But is it even usable? by RatherBeAnonymous · 2014-05-02 02:49 · Score: 1
  
  SMART is trash. I have had drives that were making whirring and clicking sounds, but SMART still checked out as OK.
46. Re: But is it even usable? by MukiMuki · 2014-05-02 02:55 · Score: 1
  
  Nobody mentions ZFS? The only thing that can concievably survive an accidental dd followed by an accidental rm -rf?
47. Re:But is it even usable? by WuphonsReach · 2014-05-02 03:04 · Score: 2
  
  Initially I thought that might not be true because tape will still be linear and you would still need to move it past the read heads.
  
  Let's assume a 100m long piece of tape that holds 1TB. That means each meter of tape is about 10GB/m of storage density. If tape flows past the head at a rate of 1m per minute, you are looking at read/write rates of 167 MB/s.
  
  Now, let's change the bit density of the tape to be 50 GB/meter. The tape still flows past the read/write head at 1m/min. Which gives us read/write rates of 5x greater (~833MB/s).
  
  The only variable here is whether the read/write head can react fast enough to the data rate (which is a function of how high a frequency the hardware can operate at).
  
  --
  Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
48. Re: But is it even usable? by FireFury03 · 2014-05-02 03:07 · Score: 1
  
  Nobody mentions ZFS? The only thing that can concievably survive an accidental dd followed by an accidental rm -rf?
  And still, you'd be stupid to not have a proper backup since you're screwed if (a) you end up with massive filesystem corruption (software bug, hardware failure, etc. or (b) your server catches fire (or similar failure that physically destroys all your disks).
  
  --
  http://blog.nexusuk.org
49. Re: But is it even usable? by Xaedalus · 2014-05-02 03:09 · Score: 1
  
  Yeah, I work in tape. I've heard your argument over and over again espoused by fellow RAID enthusiasts and people who hate tape. You fail to account for the inevitable rogue wave of human stupidity that will strike the network and take out the RAID servers--and it does happen, no matter how well designed the RAID array set-up is. I make loads of money off of CTOs and sysadmins who learn this to their sorrow. Not to mention that keeping two completely separate RAID arrays that mirror each other tends to be unsustainable longer than two-to-three years due to rack space, or to constantly having to swap out every single drive in the RAID array with larger and larger drives just to maintain capacity without increasing footprint. Tape is boring, old tech that is almost bulletproof when it comes to ensuring that your network is up. RAID arrays are for near-line storage directly off primary, but Tape is what insures that your company survives human stupidity
  
  --
  Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
50. Re:But is it even usable? by WuphonsReach · 2014-05-02 03:12 · Score: 1
  
  Depends on how you are doing the backups. Say you only have 1TB of data, you could back it up once per day appending and only need to swap out tapes every 9 months or so.
  
  Unless they make the tape material out of unobtainium, odds are high that you would break the tape well before the 9 months is up. LTO-5 end-to-end read/write durability is only about 200 passes. Half that number if you do a full tape verify after write (which counts as an additional R/W pass).
  
  If you use a different tape for each day of the week, with a 2-week cycle (10 total tapes), you need to consider replacing tapes after 2-3 years (52-78 uses).
  
  --
  Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
51. Re: But is it even usable? by delt0r · 2014-05-02 03:17 · Score: 1
  
  Yes, we suspected this also.
  
  --
  If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
52. Re:But is it even usable? by Anonymous Coward · 2014-05-02 03:27 · Score: 0
  
  Wow, another moron who never stepped into the larger world of tech. I suppose you're also one of those idiots that think all software development is the same as your needs.
53. Re:But is it even usable? by elistan · 2014-05-02 03:29 · Score: 1
  I don't think you can make valid estimations about the write speed of this new potential format by assuming it'll work at LTO 6 speeds. As density goes up, so does write speed.
  Consider LTO 1 through 6:
  
  LTO1 - 4880 bits/mm, 20 MB/sec
  LTO2 - 7398 bits/mm, 40 MB/sec
  LTO3 - 9638 bits/mm, 80 MB/sec
  LTO4 - 13250 bits/mm, 120 MB/sec
  LTO5 - 15142 bits/mm, 140 MB/sec
  LTO6 - 15143 bits/mm, 160 MB/sec
  It seems that doubling storage density yields slightly more than double the speed. (And obviously, like going from LTO5 to LTO6, speed can be increased without any sort of density improvement.) So if we extrapolate that to this new format, at 74 times the density, it perhaps can perform at 74 times the speed, and therefore fill up a tape within a reasonable timeframe. (Which, admittedly, is pure speculation - until actual speed specifications are released for this format, we just don't know.)
  But if I was an IT manager, I wouldn't be looking at 185 TB tapes in order to do a full 185 TB local backup every weekend to be sent to an offsite vault. Instead, I'd be looking at 185 TB tapes if I had a remote site, at least 20 miles away, I'm connected to via a fast fiber link, that holds an active replication of my entire 50TB SAN, and I want to store a year's worth of weekly backups, plus a few month's worth of daily backups, in a 40-slot tape library instead of multiple 200-slot tape libraries. Then I could quickly restore almost any file without having to recall tapes, plus have a hot and ready copy of my data in case a flood, fire, earthquake, etc., strikes the primary site. (The logistics of setting up the network, the servers, the SAS connections, etc., not withstanding. :-)
  Such a tape isn't for home use or small business use - it's for IBM, Google, Amazon and the like I suspect.
54. Re: But is it even usable? by Anonymous Coward · 2014-05-02 03:36 · Score: 0
  
  And banks to keep things for 10 years. Tape libraries are great for that. Especially the output bin that is stores in a fireproof media safe of site.
55. Re:But is it even usable? by donaldm · 2014-05-02 04:03 · Score: 1
  
  So at 185TB per tape with the write speed of LTO6 "at speeds up to 400MB/s (1.4TB/hr)" [optimal]....~132 hrs per tape. But in reality 300 MB/s or 1 TB/hr so about 176 hr/tape. 168 hours in a week.....Next weekly back up starts before the first one finished.....
  Yeah, I know, they're not all level 0 backups.....you get the idea....sometimes it might be better to have 2 smaller tapes, than 1 large.
  If that is the case then your backup strategy is totally wrong. To get the best performance from a backup you should be streaming your data to the actual tape, however this in practice is rarely true.and consequently you get what is commonly called a "shoe-shine effect" in that the data will be written to the tape then stop while waiting for the next batch of data to catch up, however when the next batch of data arrives the tape has to reposition itself. Obviously this is very inefficient and can add a considerable amount of time to the backup.
  To get around the "shoe-shine effect" you can purchase a virtual tape storage library which contains an array of RAID disks, a smart controller and one or more tape devices. By doing this you can create one or more virtual tape drives from the disks and at specific times the data that is stored by the virtual tape devices are streamed to the tape drive with zero impact on the machines that you are backing up. A virtual tape library also has the added benefit of allowing for extremely fast backup and recovery as well as a streamed backup method to tape that fully utilises the tape drives performance..
  Is a virtual tape library expensive? The best way to answer this is to ask how much is your data worth and what are the ramification and costs if you you need to make a recovery and there is a problem with your backups. Once you have done your research a virtual tape library can cost from a few thousand dollars to many thousands of dollars which like I said requires you as the proposer of said device to do your homework.
  
  --
  There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
56. Re:But is it even usable? by afidel · 2014-05-02 05:41 · Score: 1
  
  Be careful with multiplexing, it speeds backups but can make restores brutal. We did a test restore of our full file server once and realized we couldn't hit the 72 hour SLA due to shoe shining during restore, we ended up pulling our multiplexing back from 8 to 2 which required a few more drives in the library to complete weekly backups in the same timeframe.
  
  --
  There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
57. Re: But is it even usable? by Culture20 · 2014-05-02 06:35 · Score: 1
  
  accidentally running "rm -rf /"
  Pro-tip for when you absolutely must use rm -rf for anything:
  first type the directory you're planning to delete
  # /\!BigData\!
  then go back to the beginning of the prompt and add the recursive rm
  # rm -rf /\!BigData\!
  This way, a typo when reaching for a \ ' ] or "shift" won't start a terrible cascade.
58. Re:But is it even usable? by Anonymous Coward · 2014-05-02 08:41 · Score: 0
  
  an array of RAID disks
  Is it redundant?
59. Re: But is it even usable? by OdinOdin_ · 2014-05-02 09:50 · Score: 1
  
  Hmm but you should be having your RAID system perform:
  
  * verification (checking a read to all copies and CRC validates correctly as expected)
  
  * scrubbing (writing some other random patterns to each block of the disk, to confirm the disk is in good order, and will take new data, it also re-energises the disk, the original data is then written back into the block, and then verified, before it moves on to another part of the disk, this operation often requires battery backed memory, since the original data is preserved robustly this way over unwanted power outage).
  
  Ideally you should verify (the whole storage) at least once per week, and scrub (the whole storage) once per month. These operations with hardware cards can be performed slowly in the background, but often a few hours a day during offpeak will do the job.
  
  Doing this alone can extend the life of disks, compared to writing some block of data, no accessing it for 5 years, then wondering why in 5 years time the block is no corrupted.
  
  Both these operations provide a better health check of RAID than SMART along, since SMART only knows of a problem after it saw a problem, and that often requires you to access the problem area of disk. This is what verification/scrubbing does on your behalf continuously over a week.
60. Re: But is it even usable? by Anonymous Coward · 2014-05-02 09:55 · Score: 0
  
  Commands that start destructive and get less so as you type are bad design. SQL has the same issue:
  Delete from importantCustomerData where x=y
  I always type the condition first, and my colleagues look at me like I'm weird.
61. Re: But is it even usable? by Bitmanhome · 2014-05-02 09:59 · Score: 1
  
  I start with
  # ls "/!BigData!"
  to verify the computer is finding the dir I want to delete, then edit the command and insert rm -rf.
  
  --
  Not that this wasn't entirely predictable.
62. Re: But is it even usable? by Wolfrider · 2014-05-04 21:21 · Score: 1
  
  --PROTIP for anyone who has to delete a directory from the command prompt (not using a script):
  ** USE MIDNIGHT COMMANDER. **
  --The #1 cause of unexpected system crashes was determined to be ' rm ' typos or misuse.
  --I login as root on a near-daily regular basis. I don't delete *anything* more than a few files without using MC, and the only root-caused crash I've had was back in the 90's - when I accidentally typed /dev/sda in a dd command (on a family PC) instead of /dev/fd0.
  --MC lets you use Insert to tag files, * to tag by wildcards, and then F8 to delete files and directories safely.
  
  --
  .
  == WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??
63. Re: But is it even usable? by Anonymous Coward · 2014-05-08 06:33 · Score: 0
  
  K. S. Kyosuke: You've been called out (for tossing names) & you ran "forrest" from a fair challenge http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
Yay by Anonymous Coward · 2014-05-01 21:47 · Score: 0

Need to fire up my c64
Future of sony media? by wbr1 · 2014-05-01 22:02 · Score: 2

New games and movies may be packaged this way. 180TB of DRM, 5TB of content.

--
Silence is a state of mime.
1. Re:Future of sony media? by oodaloop · 2014-05-01 23:06 · Score: 2
  
  180TB of DRM, 5TB of content.
  Then how would you fit a rootkit in there?
  
  /ducks
  
  --
  Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
2. Re:Future of sony media? by wbr1 · 2014-05-02 04:06 · Score: 1
  
  That is part of the DRM package. They cannot blatantly call it a rootkit now can they?
  
  --
  Silence is a state of mime.
Sadly life isnt long enough by Anonymous Coward · 2014-05-01 22:09 · Score: 1

to restore all that back from tape though
Yes, but .... by Crypto+Gnome · 2014-05-01 22:39 · Score: 0

185TB on a cartridge is impressive .. BUT

Does it generate XRAYS when you peel the tape off the spool?

And can you tape your children to the ceiling with it? (or make a boat, or even an airplane?)

--
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
Windows Admins by Anonymous Coward · 2014-05-01 22:44 · Score: 0

Windows Admins have taken over this site. We have a lot of data, not in the NSA category but in the "station wagons full of tape" category. We don't need much of it very often, and tape is a hell of a lot cheaper and more reliable than spinning disks. If you're talking some small 100 to 1000 disk array, sure, but if your data is valuable and irreplaceable, get with the big kids and use tape for backups.
And yes, a V40 has more bandwidth than we can get with fiber.
Nostalgia by StripedCow · 2014-05-01 23:05 · Score: 5, Funny

What's next? Discs of vinyl which can hold up to 1000 songs?

--
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
1. Re:Nostalgia by Anonymous Coward · 2014-05-02 01:18 · Score: 0
  
  They would still sound better than MP3
2. Re:Nostalgia by Z80a · 2014-05-02 01:45 · Score: 1
  
  You probably can pull that off with compressed music in a lossy format like OGG and a CED disc:
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
  If the CED is able to keep a image quality at least comparable to the VHS, you can use an ARVID solution to store data on it:
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
  At the 325 KB/s mode, you can store up around 1.1 GB of data per side of the CED, or 2.2 GB total, thus allowing you to store 1000 songs of up to 2.2MB of size.
3. Re:Nostalgia by asvravi · 2014-05-02 02:38 · Score: 1
  
  Not so fast! They still haven't perfected slipstream of rootkits onto Vinyl.
4. Re:Nostalgia by Anonymous Coward · 2014-05-02 06:31 · Score: 0
  
  Or if you encode the envelopes of a vocoded signal in analog format. This would be a really neat way to get more out of records, but it only works well for speech.
  Speex, and other telephony codecs would work well if you want to go digital.
5. Re:Nostalgia by Anonymous Coward · 2014-05-03 07:09 · Score: 0
  
  Just burn a bunch of MP3 files to an LP-ROM.
Restore something after every backup by Maxo-Texas · 2014-05-01 23:15 · Score: 5, Interesting

If you don't restore at least one file after every back up, you are going to discover (as a company I worked for found) that your tape is blank when you need it most.

--
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
1. Re:Restore something after every backup by Anonymous Coward · 2014-05-02 01:21 · Score: 0
  
  I was contracting at a small company a few years back and just in passing noticed a message on the fileserver backup screen as the tape was removed and put in the fire safe. It read "Tape full. Insert tape 2"
2. Re:Restore something after every backup by jabuzz · 2014-05-02 02:05 · Score: 2
  
  Rubbish, what you found is that you had inadequate backup software and monitoring of the backup process.
3. Re:Restore something after every backup by Maxo-Texas · 2014-05-02 03:09 · Score: 1
  
  It was state of the art; recommended by IBM; and was reporting successful backups to the AS/400 without errors.
  The only way to be sure is to restore something. Then you know.
  If your entire company (or personal financial life) is literally at stake on the backup, based on experience, I recommend you restore items from the backup to confirm success. It's a lot of risk mitigation for a couple minutes extra work.
  But hey, your funeral, eh?
  
  --
  She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
4. Re:Restore something after every backup by Sarlok · 2014-05-02 03:31 · Score: 1
  
  And even that doesn't fully protect you; the drive can always eat the tape. It happened to me once when I needed to restore something. You plan, take good backups, even test them out, but when you need it is when the drive will fail and eat your latest backup tape.
5. Re:Restore something after every backup by afidel · 2014-05-02 05:49 · Score: 1
  
  I've always said if you don't have an offsite, offline, and verified backup you don't have a backup at all =)
  
  --
  There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
6. Re:Restore something after every backup by antdude · 2014-05-02 12:46 · Score: 1
  
  Or the whole thing to be sure nothing is bad.
  
  --
  Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
7. Re:Restore something after every backup by Maxo-Texas · 2014-05-02 14:21 · Score: 1
  
  That would require a duplicate of production... which is not practical for many companies even today.
  But, it would be great. Mirroring is used instead since you can "hotswap" over to the mirror (which my last company did once a month, reasonably seamlessly after five or six painful non-seamless swaps at the beginning).
  
  --
  She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Another wonder-tape that will never materialize... by gweihir · 2014-05-01 23:15 · Score: 1

I remember several of them.

--
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Using Current sense rather than old tech? by Anonymous Coward · 2014-05-01 23:22 · Score: 0

Disk drives improved density when they went current sense and GMR heads.
Putting the same tech to work on tape is well overdue, plus some smarts for tape stretch and the like.
It will be smarter putting the prime stuff in the middle of the tape - but this has not yet occurred.
Encrypted tape, would be so new, the forensics mob wouldn't know jack shirt let alone polyphase merges using RECFM=U
We've probably seen this technology used before. by Ecuador · 2014-05-01 23:44 · Score: 1

I know it is no longer sold - read the reviews to get the idea, but a pre-pre-release of this technology from Sony, could explain why this particular tape was selling for 39.2 million pounds each, while masquerading as a simple DV tape.

--
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Security cameras by wjcofkc · 2014-05-01 23:50 · Score: 4, Interesting

This would be great for security camera applications. The number one reason resolution sucks on security camera recordings is due to a lack of storage. Rather than seeing a indecipherable black and white (color is even worse) video of a suspect robbing a store, we would get it in HD. Have a few cameras on the inside, and on the outside to capture the getaway car, this could actually discourage some crimes.

--
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
1. Re:Security cameras by wisnoskij · 2014-05-02 00:30 · Score: 2
  
  Well they seem to do OK. Whenever they show those 5 pixel faces on the TV, they always seem to be able to identify the culprit.
  
  --
  Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
2. Re:Security cameras by operagost · 2014-05-02 01:56 · Score: 1
  
  ENHANCE!
  
  --
  
  Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
And the price of a 185TB cartridge by overshoot · 2014-05-01 23:54 · Score: 1

... will be only three times that of the same storage in disks.

--
Lacking <sarcasm> tags, /. substitutes moderation as "Troll."
1. Re:And the price of a 185TB cartridge by Anonymous Coward · 2014-05-02 07:03 · Score: 0
  
  the cartridge itself is like 50 bucks. the reader on the other hand is stupid expensive.
Slight by Anonymous Coward · 2014-05-02 00:06 · Score: 0

Lack of vision though. Is tape the only mechanism for backup if an EMP (Electro Magnetic Pulse) is used? Otherwise, it seems antiquated. I'm proud retro and would use mini disks to back up non essential data but because they are defunct I wouldn't want to rely on them for serious stuff. Holographic for high capacity and crystal etched for long endurance seems to be the way to go. I'm not seeing a future for tape, and Blue Ray etc. will not last past this current generation of consoles either I think. It will go the same way as sloppy.
1. Re:Slight by datapharmer · 2014-05-02 00:25 · Score: 2
  
  Right, and how is the firmware on the drive for your non-magnetic media holding up after that EMP blast? You did remember to load a copy of the firmware onto a disk too, right? Oh, and the bios for the computer you were planning on restoring to, and the hard-drive firmware and other various chipset firmwares? I think come an EMP blast you had better set the computer aside and know how to be a dirt farmer before you starve. Even if you get your own files restored it is unlikely you will be able to do much else unless you plan on helping the telco reprogram all their equipment to get the network back up etc. In the meantime, you starve.
  
  --
  Get a web developer
2. Re:Slight by K.+S.+Kyosuke · 2014-05-02 01:00 · Score: 1
  
  Oh, come one, microfiche is the way to go for catastrophic scenarios. In the worst case, you'll read it using a Visby lens, like the Vikings did.
  
  --
  Ezekiel 23:20
3. Re:Slight by Anonymous Coward · 2014-05-08 06:32 · Score: 0
  
  K. S. Kyosuke: You've been called out (for tossing names) & you ran "forrest" from a fair challenge http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
s /sloppy/floppy by Anonymous Coward · 2014-05-02 00:11 · Score: 0

sloppy -> floppy
It doesn't have to be 180 TB by Anonymous Coward · 2014-05-02 00:11 · Score: 0

If require less than that, for example, 2 TB, it takes less. You could even backup the data several times on the same tape!
me too by tleaf100 · 2014-05-02 00:24 · Score: 0

exactly.
Millions of tapes at single customers by Leadmagnet · 2014-05-02 00:40 · Score: 1

I have been to financial and medial customer sites that have rooms bigger than football fields with nothing more that hundreds of rows of selves, and many tens of millions of tapes. I am sure they would like rejoice in this greater density.

--
http://www.leadmagnet.50megs.com
Proprietary format? by AnalogDiehard · 2014-05-02 01:05 · Score: 1

Color me reluctant, but I have no interest because Sony is notorious for proprietary formats that lock you into their product and I still despise their hostile disposition for customers when they gave us the rootkit scandal.

--
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
1. Re:Proprietary format? by afidel · 2014-05-02 05:55 · Score: 1
  
  Sony's part of the LTO consortium so I'd assume the technology would end up there unless Sony strongly feels they have everyone else beat and can convince enough shops that they can go it alone (I know I wouldn't touch a single vendor tape standard with a 10' pole but plenty of folks use the proprietary StorageTek and IBM formats).
  
  --
  There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
2. Re:Proprietary format? by Anonymous Coward · 2014-05-02 14:36 · Score: 0
  
  Color me reluctant, but I have no interest because Sony is notorious for proprietary formats that lock you into their product and I still despise their hostile disposition for customers when they gave us the rootkit scandal.
  I wouldn't worry, I have been reading about all these wondrous new data storage breakthroughs for years on Slashdot. Not a one of them has ever made it to market. This is yet another of what I call "Hey, lookie what we can do in a lab." Most of these either turn out to have "problems", are impractical, overly expensive, or never make it to market for other reasons (it's too good, too fast. We can make a lot more money by coming out with smaller improvements first and stretching things out.").
Hmmm by koan · 2014-05-02 01:22 · Score: 1

The really good news is if this gets adopted all the other tape products will drop in cost.

--
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Sorry, I'm waiting for holographic storage... by iceperson · 2014-05-02 01:28 · Score: 1

nt
Ok, so what's the actual size? by master_kaos · 2014-05-02 01:35 · Score: 1

Why does it seem like every time there is a "major breakthrough" or new format that offers "massive stoarge", when it actually materilizes it is way less storage then advertised? I thought when Bluray was announced it was suppose to feature up to 250GB, and I remember reading an article years ago that Pioneer created a 500GB disk.
And what about all the major breakthroughs in hdd that I hear about every other year, yet space seems to be going up at a fairly slow but consistent pace.
Must either be a) marketing gimmick, or b) might as well increase incrementally to milk the most money out of people
1. Re:Ok, so what's the actual size? by TangoMargarine · 2014-05-02 04:13 · Score: 2
  
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
  
  Conventional (pre-BD-XL) Blu-ray Discs contain 25 GB per layer, with dual layer discs (50 GB) being the industry standard for feature-length video discs. Triple layer discs (100 GB) and quadruple layers (128 GB) are available for BD-XL re-writer drives.
  
  --
  Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
And what's the throughput on one of these things? by Chas · 2014-05-02 01:42 · Score: 1

Doesn't much help if backing up to tape and recovery of said "gobs and gobs of data" takes longer than the remaining lifespan of the universe.

--

Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Yeah, but by rsilvergun · 2014-05-02 01:44 · Score: 5, Funny

my MP3s have a warmer, more natural tone coming out of a tape deck.

--
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Could get better results using Dolby by Anonymous Coward · 2014-05-02 01:49 · Score: 0

Dolby makes it better. Blinded by science! Maybe this tape won't lose it all after sitting on the shelf. Bleed through is bad. My original The Beatles tapes are backmasked now. Not good. Pre-Dolby days so understandable.
More Eggs Per Basket! by Robscura · 2014-05-02 02:31 · Score: 1

The first time I do a restore from one of these, I'll think "Finally, a way to lose 185TB of data all at once."
Data cubes next? by PeterL.Berghold · 2014-05-02 02:57 · Score: 1

I have been pondering: how many Tb were those data crystals on Star Trek anyway?
Not your grandma's physics by Anonymous Coward · 2014-05-02 03:40 · Score: 0

Not just increase the data density by a factor of 74, but increase the data density *per square inch* by a factor of 74!
Re:tape? by bws111 · 2014-05-02 03:52 · Score: 1

Estimates are that between 50 and 80% of the worlds data is on tape. If you have not heard of it, that is your problem.
Wait for the others by Anonymous Coward · 2014-05-02 03:59 · Score: 0

Wait for the other companies to duplicate Sony's efforts with capacities +/- 10% of Sony's, but without all the proprietary crap, not-invented-here technology, non-interoperability and all the rest. Sony can make wonderful products, but they never allow standards be born from their products, don't license their stuff to others, and don't try to play nice with others (while simultaneously charging outrageous prices for their stuff). I will wait. 185 TB is nice though. I know of a lot of data centres that could have used 185 TB cartridges years ago.
Only problem... by sconeu · 2014-05-02 04:03 · Score: 1

It installs rootkit software on your server that won't let you do any backups if it finds even a single MP3 file.

--
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Not just size that counts by Dcnjoe60 · 2014-05-02 04:05 · Score: 1

It's not just the size that counts! Granted that 185TB data cartridges is impressive, but how long does it take to read/write such a monster?
Re:We've probably seen this technology used before by TangoMargarine · 2014-05-02 04:08 · Score: 1

All I'm seeing in these reviews is a bunch of off-the-wall fiction completely unconnected to reality. Is this a joke?

1 star
I've been saving up for over 14 lifetimes to purchase this box to help me record home movies, however I was very dissapointed with the product, as upon opening it burst into an array of colors to the likes of which I'd never seen, cured my mono, cured my dog's mono, gave me x-ray vision, allowed me to fly, raised my IQ by over 170 points, gave me the power of invincibility, gave me the power of invisibility, crafted me a working Iron Man Suit, and above all made me a sandwich that tasted like dreams. It did all these things but it didn't even work right when I tried to use it for my home movies with my dog. I threw it out yesterday.

--
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
Obligatory by Meneth · 2014-05-02 04:23 · Score: 1

What could ever replace the durability of magnetic tape? Duct tape, maybe.
Two words: background scrubbing by dutchwhizzman · 2014-05-02 05:15 · Score: 1

With any raid 4/5/6 system, parity and thus read errors aren't tested on normal read access. That means that unless you specifically tell the software/controller to do so, all raid does is *write* parity bits. It never checks the validity. A good practice and usually implemented in enterprise SAN/NAS systems, is to use background scrubbing to do just that. Background scrubbing uses "unused" IO capacity to read all disks, check parity and figure out which disk has errors. If the disk can reallocate sectors it will tell it to do that, optionally log this and if the disk can't, it will fail the disk and go on in degraded mode.
If you think raid errors and failures are "normal", you should look at how your raid system is set up. If no background scrubbing is implemented, you should seriously consider either setting it up (after making sure your backups work) or getting proper storage that has it built in. Also, consider going for raid 1 or raid 10, since disks aren't that expensive any more and the write IO capacity of 1 and 10 is much higher than that of raid 4/5/6.

--
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
1. Re:Two words: background scrubbing by delt0r · 2014-05-02 05:40 · Score: 1
  
  I didn't say normal. I said happened twice. There is a dogma out there that RAID is backup. Clearly from replies this is not the case. Even once if that is your backup is the end of your business if your into data storage.
  
  Love the comment "disks aren't that expensive anymore". Do you know what RAID was when it came out, what the 4 letters stand for? I was working in a job in previous life where would go through a room full of RAID drives pull out the ones with red lights, swap for the fresh drives and shipped the ones we pulled out back to SUN.
  
  --
  If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
2. Re: Two words: background scrubbing by Anonymous Coward · 2014-05-02 10:10 · Score: 0
  
  Raid is the HA side of your HA/DR solution. No need to halt business just because 1 drive goes bad, just swap it out. But you still need tape being shuttled offsite for your DR scenario.
  I used to work in a small company providing IT infrastructure to companies too small to justify a full time tech team but too large to get away with a single Jack of all trades techie. All our customers had a full HA/DR plan, even if that consisted of a server stored in a managers garage, guaranteed access to a loaner tape drive (we used LTO4 for all our customers so their contracts contributed to us keeping one around) and tapes taken home by a secretary each night and kept in a small fireproof safe.
  Any company, from a 10 person business up to an enormous multi national can afford to do HA/DR properly, it just might require a more creative approach.
Well... by Anonymous Coward · 2014-05-02 06:13 · Score: 0

NSA jacking off to this as we speak...
I use to keep a dlt on my pc by Anonymous Coward · 2014-05-02 06:43 · Score: 0

Then Writable DVD came out then BlueRay.
But that is cool what is its speed.
nice quote by Anonymous Coward · 2014-05-02 08:08 · Score: 0

and how many of us do this sub consciously?
Don't Forget the Old Adage by Toad-san · 2014-05-02 08:37 · Score: 1

" Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.
—Tanenbaum, Andrew S. (1989). Computer Networks. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall. p. 57. ISBN 0-13-166836-6. "
Re:We've probably seen this technology used before by Anonymous Coward · 2014-05-03 05:39 · Score: 0

It was a Sony DV tape selling for 39.2 million GBP, hence the wacky reviews.
10 times better than that is possible. by Anonymous Coward · 2014-05-03 23:05 · Score: 0

see http://www.sciencemag.org/content/343/6176/1228.figures-only
See Fig. 2, that iron disk is under 2 nm across.