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220TB Tapes Show Tape Storage Still Has a Long Future

Posted by Soulskill on from the 11.73-libraries-of-congress-per-pony dept.

alphadogg writes: IBM and Fujifilm have figured out how to fit 220TB of data on a standard-size tape that fits in your hand, flexing the technology's strengths as a long-term storage medium. The prototype Fujifilm tape and accompanying drive technology from IBM labs packs 88 times as much data onto a tape as industry-standard LTO-6 systems using the same size cartridge, IBM says. LTO6 tape can hold 2.5TB, uncompressed, on a cartridge about 4 by 4 inches across and 2 centimeters thick. The new technologies won't come out in products for several years.

8 of 229 comments (clear)

  1. LHC Too by Njorthbiatr · · Score: 4, Interesting

    They use tapes to store all that data they get from smashing tiny bits together. Totally forget how much one of their tapes hold, but at the time I remember thinking it was a lot.

    1. Re:LHC Too by americanpossum · · Score: 3, Interesting

      From http://cerncourier.com/cws/art...

      The current candidates for the tape drives that will record LHC experimental data are the enterprise-class drives from IBM and Sun StorageTek. These are the IBM 3592 EO5, which has a native data rate of 100 MB/s; and the Sun StorageTek T10000, which has a native data rate of 120 MB/s. Both of these drives use a 500 GB capacity cartridge.

      The interesting thing is that the LHC can generate up to 6GB of data per second, which means that even a 500GB tape will only last for 83 seconds. It's good that they've got all of those robots handling these tapes.

  2. Never consumer ready by BenJeremy · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Wake me when tape is reliable AND costs 10% of the $/GB of hard drive storage.

    Worthwhile for enterprise... maybe. I haven't even looked at a tape backup in decades, but I do not relish paying more for a single tape than an entire 2TB HDD... as a consumer, or even as an enthusiast. It's cheaper and possibly more reliable to do backups to BD-R at this point, or simply use redundant HDDs as backup devices.

    1. Re:Never consumer ready by SuricouRaven · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Even enterprises are using a lot of SATA drives now. The super-fast-and-reliable niche that used to belong to enterprise drives has gone to flash. It's usually cheaper to use consumer drives and some better software to manage the inevitable failure than to use enterprise drives.

    2. Re:Never consumer ready by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 5, Interesting

      It's usually cheaper to use consumer drives and some better software to manage the inevitable failure than to use enterprise drives.

      There is NO difference in reliability between "consumer" and "enterprise" drives. The only reason to buy enterprise drives is because you have excess money that you are too stupid to keep. All the big storage companies use consumer grade drives, and several of them, including Google and Backblaze, have published data that clearly show there is no reliability or performance reason to buy "enterprise" drives. They are a scam.

    3. Re:Never consumer ready by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      having worked for a storage vendor for many years, i have data that says you're wrong.

      in the early days, we allowed customers to buy their own drives. many of them got
      consumer drives and suffered for it. one customer bought 16 consumer grade drives
      from either wd or segate (i forget), and every one failed within two years.
      in my own personal array, i caught samsung 750gb drives lying to me about having
      written data after a power outage. (reading returned all 0s after having flushed the
      cache.)

      as we got more sophisticated, we found there were two reasons we found for this. enterprise
      hard drives are built differently, and they run different software with different settings.
      because of the better hardware, the mtbf is quite a bit better, and because of the better
      software, a failure is more likely to be obvious. there's nothing better at trashing data
      than a silently failed drive.

      i'm not saying there are smoke and mirrors features. sas seems worthless to me,
      except it is often tied to better hardware....

  3. Re:more interesting question by Paradise+Pete · · Score: 3, Interesting

    What is the write speed of this technology ?

    Back in the early 80's I had a job working at night watching the network of the then-new ATMs, and restarting them when they crashed (often). It was a time-sharing place with big mainframes and giant spools of tape. The write speed on those was horrible, partly because first you had to wake up the invariably dozing tape hanger, who would then stumble over, find the proper tape, and put it on the spool.

  4. Capacity isn't the problem. by geekmux · · Score: 4, Interesting

    "...The new technologies won't come out in products for several years."

    Er, several years?

    For a minute there, I thought they were referring to the restore time for a full cartridge.

    Capacity isn't really the problem with tape media. It's sitting around waiting for ages if you ever have to actually execute a full restore of that much data from tape.

    Not quite sure why it remains a viable solution for that reason alone, especially in this era of the InstaTwitterVine level of instant gratification. Spinning rust in the cloud might be a bit more volatile, but it will likely always be a hell of a lot faster.