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jfruh (300774) writes "Who says tape storage is out of date?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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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 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.
2. 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?
  
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3. 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.
  
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4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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
7. 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.
8. 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.
  
  --
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9. 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.
  
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10. 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.
  
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  There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
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 davidhoude · 2014-05-01 21:51 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  Say what? Everyone here keeps telling me that RAID is backups!
2. Re:But is it even usable? by Lumpy · 2014-05-01 22:31 · Score: 2
  
  It's only the Bohner memorial Porn wing...
  
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3. 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.
  
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4. 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!)
  
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5. 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.
  
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6. 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.
7. 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.
  
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8. 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.
9. 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.
10. 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?
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.
Nostalgia by StripedCow · 2014-05-01 23:05 · Score: 5, Funny

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

--
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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 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.
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.
  
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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
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.
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.

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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!
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.

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