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Sony Tape Storage Breakthrough Could Bring Us 185 TB Cartridges
jfruh (300774) writes "Who says tape storage is out of date?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.'"
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.
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.
New games and movies may be packaged this way. 180TB of DRM, 5TB of content.
Silence is a state of mime.
to restore all that back from tape though
Maybe Betamax will now be better than MP3?
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
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.
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.
I remember several of them.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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
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.
... will be only three times that of the same storage in disks.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
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
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
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.
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
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
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."
nt
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
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.
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!!!
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/
They could be ROM/flash cartridges, like oversized SD cards.
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.
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.
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."
I have been pondering: how many Tb were those data crystals on Star Trek anyway?
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
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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?
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.
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What could ever replace the durability of magnetic tape? Duct tape, maybe.
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?
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.
Then you don't deal with really large data with archival needs.
" 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. "
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.
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