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220TB Tapes Show Tape Storage Still Has a Long Future
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.
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.
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.
Write Once Read Never
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.
Properly stored tape has a lifetime of decades. See if your hard drive will spin up after sitting for one decade.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
"...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.
And much like tape, it seems like the random mixing of imperial and metric measurements won't ever go away, either :)
When I was in the military, we always measured distance along the ground in kilometers (or "clicks" in mil-lingo), but altitude was always in feet (or "angels" = 1000 feet). So at least we were metric for 2/3rds of the dimensions. With this tape, only one dimension is metric, so we are going backwards.
As for keeping H/Ss powered down - a good percentage will never spin up again, or mysteriously lose their servo tracks or something. How long have we had SATA? How much longer will we have it?
Tapes can be read after 30 years (I know, I have done this myself). Over 30 years, the drive technology may change a bit, so you probably need to keep your old drives, and SCSI is more than 30 years old. One drive will write a lot of tapes. Perhaps a few thousand before the heads wear out, and then its down to Ebay for a replacement because it is a previous generation (3 tapes a day for 3 years - 1,000).
If you were the compliance officer, where would you put the transactional data from your bank? On a USB stick under the bed is NOT the right answer. If your data is worth keeping. LTO is the way to go. Three copies, on 3 different tapes, in each of three different states.
Has anyone ever managed to READ a terabyte of paper tape? With CRC checks?
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How long does the tape media last until it deteriorates to the point where it becomes unreadable?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
... as long as you need it to minus one second.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Why isn't anyone reporting on IBM's advances in punch card microscopy? By reducing the size of the punch hole and using modern encoding systems, they've greatly increased the amount of data that can fit on a standard Hollerith card. Those who can't wire the plugboard of an IBM 407 are going to be left behind.
Here in Saskatchewan, Canada, we measure distance in time.
For example:
Person 1: "How far is Calgary from Regina?"
Person 2: "Oh about 7 hours."
I'm not sure why we do this, but this is the honest truth. My wife used to work at a service station, and had people ask how far X was. They would look at her like she was an alien if they weren't from around here.
"I don't understand why anyone would use tape. After all I've never used it/not for years/etc."
If you feel the urge to say words like this, just stop after the first 3 words. You don't understand. That's enough right there.
Some people have volumes of data that you cannot fathom. Some organizations have use cases that you haven't encountered. Maybe even some organizations make decisions that' could be handled another way, and maybe that different way might be better too. But's that's speculative based upon NO information.
The continuing demand for tape pretty well speaks for itself though.
Actually, the article gave all metric primary measurements, and English in parentheses for enough of them for the metric-impaired to understand the scale.
"...about 10 by 10 centimeters (4 by 4 inches) across and 2 centimeters thick"
So apparently, it was the OP who took the queue from NASA.
Existing tape technology (LTO 6 and newer) is no slouch. I can saturate an 8 GB FC link with an eight drive silo and Solaris or AIX driving it (with TSM or Networker as a backup infrastructure.)
> Tape isn't dead, but it's not worth it for small quantities
The cheapest LTO-6 drive on NewEgg is $1500, and Sony has the tapes for $18/TB. External hard drives are running about $35/TB. So you need ~90 TB for cost crossover on sheer data volume, not considering usability and reliability.
People who quote that hard drives are cheaper than tape always leave out the cost of electricity and reliability. If I'm going to tape, that is one of the reasons whether it's backup or archiving. I can take that tape out and store it w/o power for years and reliably read it back.
How long can you reliably do that with a hard drive? The mfg don't design drives for that, they design for always powered up drives. If I need that, I probably need to test for it and that can change with models and firmware settings. So you might have those costs for a powered off drive. If it doesn't last as long, you have medium exchange.
HDs are more delicate. I can reliably ship a tape cross country and read it on the other side. USB hard drives, not so much. I can put tapes in a vast array that a robot retrieves from so human hands don't damage them transferring them. I can't do that with HDs.
I put ~ 20 GB on 4mm DATs in the 90s (1.3 GB/ea) and read them back 10 years later. Drive was ~ $1k, tapes $10 so the cost was ~ $1200. Disk was $100/GB (probably more, 4GB drives came out ~ 97) so I would've need $2000 of them. If I needed to keep them spun up how much was 10 years of electricity + the SCSI interfaces ($200 * 2?) to keep them running + the enclosure to put them in (20+ drives? ).
Costs for the drives *today* would be much lower, but the electricity over 10 years is still there.