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IBM and Sony Cram Up To 330 Terabytes Into Tiny Tape Cartridge (arstechnica.co.uk)

Posted by msmash on from the breakthrough dept.

IBM and Sony have developed a new magnetic tape system capable of storing 201 gigabits of data per square inch, for a max theoretical capacity of 330 terabytes in a single palm-sized cartridge. From a report: To achieve such a dramatic increase in areal density, Sony and IBM tackled different parts of the problem: Sony developed a new type of tape that has a higher density of magnetic recording sites, and IBM Research worked on new heads and signal processing tech to actually read and extract data from those nanometre-long patches of magnetism. Sony's new tape is underpinned by two novel technologies: an improved built-in lubricant layer, which keeps it running smoothly through the machine, and a new type of magnetic layer. Usually, a tape's magnetic layer is applied in liquid form, kind of like paint -- which is one of the reasons that magnetic tape is so cheap and easy to produce in huge quantities. In this case, Sony has instead used sputter deposition, a mature technique that has been used by the semiconductor and hard drive industries for decades to lay down thin films.

71 comments

  1. creimer amazon affialite link in post by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Putting a few of their numbers together seems to imply a read bandwidth of 24 Tbps (330 terabytes = 330*8 terabits/tape, tape length = 1098 meters => 2.4 terabits/meter, tape speed = 10 m/s => 24 Tb/s). Which to me is way more interesting than the total storage size. Of course I have no idea what you could actually feed that into, it far exceeds CPU memory bandwidth, let alone SCSI or PCIE. Do these things not actually run at full speed for more than a fraction of a second?

    1. Re:creimer amazon affialite link in post by Infiniti2000 · · Score: 1

      Surprisingly, no performance discussion in the first link and I can't get access to the IEEE published paper without paying. 24Tb/s would be impressive. Also, what is the expected MTBF? Better, worse, or the same as a regular tape?

    2. Re:creimer amazon affialite link in post by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 1

      Of course you can, we have LibGen.

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
  2. Yay! by swimboy · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    Time to download more porn. ;)

    --
    Ask me how the Heisenberg Principle may or may not have saved my life.
  3. Just in time to backup holographic storage by swb · · Score: 2

    I figure both of these revolutionary technologies will hit the market at the same time.

    1. Re:Just in time to backup holographic storage by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I figure both of these revolutionary technologies will hit the market at the same time.

      Still waiting for "Archival Disc". Meanwhile, BDXL is better than a floppy.
      These days, my backup is cheap ($60) 3TB hard drives that get stored off-site [large p0rn collection to archive].

    2. Re:Just in time to backup holographic storage by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Coke Cola and Raspberry Jam.
      If the outsourced goons doing low value add dont have clean hands or eat in the operations room, I bet the backups will not be usable when needed.
      It was a problem with low density tapes, there ones will suffer in moist tropical environs , or neglected AC blowing fungus spores.
      About time GMR heads were used on tape drives. Now the problem will be if DMA throughput/bandwidth can keep up. One asks if this densitity is native or compressed - if so halve those claimed numbers.

    3. Re:Just in time to backup holographic storage by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Holographic storage has been vaporware for nearly 20 years. Inphase was talking about huge storage discs back when Windows XP came out.

      Last I heard, they managed to deliver only a tiny percentage of that capacity (under 10%?), with very slow speeds, but with a ludicrous price and zero availability.

      Meanwhile:
      -tapes cost as much per TB as external drives, are slower, require drives that cost over $1000 and complicated software...
      -Blu-ray discs cost as much per TB as external drives, but are write-once, require a $100 drive and to split data across a whole stack of discs which is annoying
      -hard drives haven't got any cheaper in the last 5 years (we never seem to have recovered from the Thailand flood)
      -SSD growth is slowing down dramatically. They can only make the flash so dense, some recent techs (TLC) are unreliable, 3D NAND hasn't done much to bring prices down (if anything we just hope it's more reliable than TLC).

    4. Re:Just in time to backup holographic storage by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      m-disc counts as an archival disc, i should think

      http://www.mdisc.com/mdisc-technology/

      I'm wondering if optical tape will ever be produced as a technology.

    5. Re:Just in time to backup holographic storage by AutodidactLabrat · · Score: 1

      No more likely than the write-once "Digital Paper" of the 1990's
      A workable tech, it just didn't find a market seller interested in working for the profit in time.

    6. Re:Just in time to backup holographic storage by mattack2 · · Score: 1

      -Blu-ray discs cost as much per TB as external drives, but are write-once, require a $100 drive and to split data across a whole stack of discs which is annoying

      I can't argue about the price, but rewritable BluRay does exist. My very limited search on Amazon found $2.63 per 25 gig rewritable disc the lowest price.

      (I was a huge fan of rewritable discs for my Toshiba xs32 hard drive/dvd recorder. Even though I do now just download shows from my tivo instead to make room, doing minimal editing directly on the recorder and then burning to disc on the XS32, or offloading to a disc for more storage or to keep, was convenient. I'd love something like that with much higher capacity and of course HD capability. BTW, there was a Tivo/DVD recorder, but it had NO editing whatsoever.)

  4. Can we get something for the consumers? by ctilsie242 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Can we get a consumer-level tape drive, something that works with USB 3.x, costs around $1000, with media costing $10-25 a cartridge, with an actual archival life, and some basic features like AES-256 encryption and compression in hardware? Having WORM media would be nice as well.

    This would solve a ton of storage/backup issues. A lot of people don't have the network connection to make cloud backups (much less complete disaster recoveries) feasible. People may not trust the cloud. Regulations may prohibit use of a remote backup provider. Or, someone just likes having the peace of mind of physical control of their data on media which might last past the end of this decade.

    There are tons of high capacity optical offerings available (Sony has some)... but other than specialty markets, they are not worth it. What would be nice would be a tape or even an optical drive for backups.

    Optical wouldn't be bad either. 400 CD jukeboxes are a solved problem, so having a BD-like format with 2-3 terabytes per disk would solve a lot of backup problems, especially with WORM capability to fend off ransomware.

    1. Re:Can we get something for the consumers? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      There are tons of high capacity optical offerings available (Sony has some)... but other than specialty markets, they are not worth it.

      Really? I thought current optical caps out at about 100GB per disc..
      Even a 1TB optical disc would be a game-changer. Problem is... it probably WON'T just look like a blu-ray and may need a vacuum sealed or gas-filled cassette with the read/write heads inside. A spec of dust at these data densities would be disastrous.

    2. Re:Can we get something for the consumers? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      NO.

      Upload your data to the cloud, where it can be mined, monetized, scrutinized, categorized, analyzed, etc.

      "Real People" don't need personal storage and encryption. Not for you, not yours, can not has.

    3. Re:Can we get something for the consumers? by fnj · · Score: 1

      If you think optical is any good whatsoever for archiving, you have never wasted time on it, No two optical drives can even agree on whether a written media can be read. Even the original drive is likely to reject a disk it wrote itself the day before. It is garbage technology on which I wasted all kinds of time and money, only to find it to have a reliability of zero. You can't have recording surfaces exposed to fingerprints and dust like that if you want something to depend on.

    4. Re:Can we get something for the consumers? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If you think optical is any good whatsoever for archiving, you have never wasted time on it, No two optical drives can even agree on whether a written media can be read. Even the original drive is likely to reject a disk it wrote itself the day before. It is garbage technology on which I wasted all kinds of time and money, only to find it to have a reliability of zero. You can't have recording surfaces exposed to fingerprints and dust like that if you want something to depend on.

      I back-up somewhat successfully to BD media. However, I put 30% par files on each disk and only burn to 90% capacity so it doesn't go to the outer edge.

    5. Re:Can we get something for the consumers? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      $1000 for a "consumer level" drive is just a tad high..

      the consumer market would expect the former cost of an external iomega zip drive ($179) and media ($10-15)... and without pesky inflation jacking the price up.

      ______

      but.. lets get right down to business here, shall we? what's the cartridge capacity? how many of these tapes can be stuffed inside a station wagon? and what's the effective cross-country bandwidth, like CA to NY?

    6. Re:Can we get something for the consumers? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I desperately need what you're asking for (cheap tape). (Though the encryption and compression aren't necessary, as everyone already has fast CPUs that can easily handle the work. Even the cheapest junk CPU that you can buy is massive overkill, and most people who would buy a tape drive, probably have a pretty good CPU.)

      In the 1990s, if you could afford the disks, you could afford the tape to cover it. But it ain't like that anymore. You can afford whole fucking arrays and they still cost far less than the tape.

    7. Re:Can we get something for the consumers? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      This. The problem with tape isn't capacity or speed. It's price.

    8. Re:Can we get something for the consumers? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Sure -- a reliable tape appliance will be available soon for $200. :) But the tapes are going to be $10,000 each. Heh heh heh heh heh.

    9. Re:Can we get something for the consumers? by UnknowingFool · · Score: 1

      The question is what do you want to do and how much space you need. If you're looking for an onsite backup, then for $1000 you can build/buy a RAID server that will handle terabytes of files. If you want offsite backup, you can also leverage that server to feed HDDs that backup and then send offsite. If you are looking for archival storage, that's another solution.

      The problem with optical has been is that most consumer grade discs are basically crap. They don't last long and they don't hold a lot. There are archival optical discs you can use which will last longer but they cost more as you need higher capacity. ($150 for 1.5TB). They are still tape you can use with varying amounts of capacity and cost.

      --
      Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
    10. Re:Can we get something for the consumers? by Big+Boss · · Score: 3, Interesting

      The only real option for most normal people is to just build a backup server with another array to hold the backups. Even ignoring media archives, personal data with photos, videos, etc. can easily approach 1TB. I just upgraded my main server, and used the old one with some of the old 2TB drives in 3-way mirrors as the backups. I'll likely move it offsite now that it's synced up.

      An affordable tape system would be great, but I have yet to find one that has a reasonable cost with better reliability than my HDD arrays, even though they require a little more maintenance. Disk will always be faster for random I/O, but tape would be great for a lot of stuff if the cost were somewhat reasonable.

      And $1000 won't do it. People won't buy it. A few people on /. might, but your average person? No way in hell. Not with 4TB HDDs under $100. $200 drives with $20 tapes might work, but they would need to be in the TB range, native. I don't see that happening, though I'd love to be wrong.

    11. Re:Can we get something for the consumers? by bigdady92 · · Score: 1

      That doesn't backup the 20TB of Linux ISO's I have stored away on my NAS/SAN. I need reliable portable, external, removable backups that I can shuffle to another location and restore when the array inevitably fails.

      I bought a Dell T4000 (48 tapes) with dual LTO-4 for $500. Ridiculous overkill for my data but you know what, it'll back everything up and I can shuffle it to another location in a fireproof box that I don't have to trust Amazon, Google, or CloudBackupVendorX to restore my data from. Everything comes on a tape.

      The 3-2-1 is the best backup solution for DataHoarder's period. Follow it and you will survive your array falling on you when it finally does.

      --
      Wheel of Time: Book by Book and Sumview (summary review) Bigdady92 style: http://bigdady92.blogspot.com/
    12. Re:Can we get something for the consumers? by radarskiy · · Score: 2

      Longer archival life for the media is irrelevant if the drive becomes obsolete, as is the case with today's tapes. LTO, for example, only guarantees backwards compatibility for two generations, which come every 2-3 years. The typical consumer isn't going to put in the time to migrate archives to the current format before old drives stop being available.

      If you think $1000 is a reasonable investment, might as well buy a new $100 hard drive every two years. Interface compatibility will be vastly easier to ensure.

    13. Re: Can we get something for the consumers? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Time machine is not raid

    14. Re: Can we get something for the consumers? by DontBeAMoran · · Score: 1

      If you want insecticide, go to Wal Mart or something.

      --
      #DeleteFacebook
    15. Re:Can we get something for the consumers? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Can we get a consumer-level tape drive, something that works with USB 3.x, costs around $1000, with media costing $10-25 a cartridge, with an actual archival life, and some basic features like AES-256 encryption and compression in hardware? Having WORM media would be nice as well.

      This would solve a ton of storage/backup issues. A lot of people don't have the network connection to make cloud backups (much less complete disaster recoveries) feasible. People may not trust the cloud. Regulations may prohibit use of a remote backup provider. Or, someone just likes having the peace of mind of physical control of their data on media which might last past the end of this decade.

      There are tons of high capacity optical offerings available (Sony has some)... but other than specialty markets, they are not worth it. What would be nice would be a tape or even an optical drive for backups.

      Optical wouldn't be bad either. 400 CD jukeboxes are a solved problem, so having a BD-like format with 2-3 terabytes per disk would solve a lot of backup problems, especially with WORM capability to fend off ransomware.

      Can we get a consumer-level tape drive, ... and some basic features like AES-256 encryption ...

      This is an accident waiting to happen. Every vendor implements encryption as they see fit, usually storing keys on either an EEPROM, flash, or battery-backed RAM -- or if you're lucky, some unused or segregated part of the tape (might waste a few blocks but that's OK). It sounds great at first, until the product in question stops working / dies / goes EoL. You were using Vendor X's drive, but now you've found Vendor Y sells a drive that supports your OMG-2113 tape form factor... except none of their contents can be read because of vendor encryption incompatibility (i.e. the tapes are considered empty). Your only choice is to scour eBay to find a replacement tape drive from Vendor X, same model, same revision, same F/W, all while praying the encryption keys are stored on some part of the tape and not the drive itself.

      This is an actual real-world problem that applies to more than just tape drives -- in actuality, USB hard disks (particularly those with USB/SATA bridges) have this exact problem. Take drive from Vendor X's product and stick it in Vendor Y's product -- or even Vendor X's own product but a different model/revision -- and you'll find none of your data is accessible (i.e. drive's contents either look blank or are gobbledegook). If you think I'm kidding, I recommend reading, not skimming, this paper -- this is why I don't buy USB/SATA enclosures that have AES encryption on them (and as someone who does data recovery, they're a nightmare!). Do the encryption using software on the host, i.e. something you have control over. Don't get screwed by vendor lock-in -- your data = your responsibility!

      On older tape drives, toggling this type of feature (ex. encryption, compression, etc.) was done with physical DIP switches -- which is exactly how it would be need to be implemented today. Implementing it through software, through some vendor-specific SCSI CDB, would be a nightmare of a different type (some drives do implement this, but as I said, it's usually through a custom SCSI CDB that isn't described in documentation, i.e. "black box magic smoke").

      At an old job in the late 90s, we used Sony AIT SDX-500C drives in a Qualstar TLS-4000 library, and I explicitly toggled (disabled) drive-level compression via the DIP switches for this exact reason. We didn't need the space (50GB on non-compressed AIT-2) was perfectly fine at the time. I didn't want to take the chance of a newer model of Sony drive would consider our tapes blank, if the SDX-500C went EoL.

      All that said: I fully agree that we need a consumer-grade backup device **that doesn't involve MHDDs**, is fairl

    16. Re:Can we get something for the consumers? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      ... why the fuck do you have 20TB of Linux ISO's?

    17. Re:Can we get something for the consumers? by Areyoukiddingme · · Score: 1

      And $1000 won't do it. People won't buy it. A few people on /. might, but your average person? No way in hell. Not with 4TB HDDs under $100. $200 drives with $20 tapes might work, but they would need to be in the TB range, native. I don't see that happening, though I'd love to be wrong.

      Agreed as to price range. And you're not wrong; it's not going to happen. It's friggin' IBM and Sony. That's practically synonymous with overpriced crap. IBM will only want to sell them with $10,000/year service contracts, and Sony will only want to sell them for $10/gig. They want to pay back the R&D after one sale. No way these drives will ever be reasonable for even medium sized enterprises, nevermind consumers.

      I too simply built a NAS. FreeNAS makes it so easy these days, and ZFS snapshots give you quite proper backup behavior. Vdevs with just three devices gives it the best chance to rebuild before a second failure ruins the volume, especially if you take care to build vdevs out of disparate devices. FreeNAS is even itself very nicely recoverable. I lost my boot volume soon after I built it, and had to reinstall. Reconstructing the volume from the imported devices worked perfectly. (I had sense enough to make a copy of the encryption key on another device.)

      The days of consumer tape are over. The days of corporate tape are fading fast, even with this new device. Unless the two companies in question do something totally out of character, it'll get bought by banks and Fortune 100 and that's about it.

    18. Re:Can we get something for the consumers? by Waccoon · · Score: 1

      This would solve a ton of storage/backup issues.

      We need proper backup software, first. All the major backup companies are moving to cloud-only storage, and OSes do everything possible to prevent backups due to piracy concerns (locking you out of root, only backing up your home folder, etc.)

      Consider that for many years the most common way to diagnose problems on PCs was to do a factory reset (whether it was labeled as such or not). Manufacturers don't give a damn about your data and will happily wipe it all out if it saves them 30 seconds on a tech support call.

      Even the FOSS community will just yell, "use rsync", oblivious to the fact that it's mirroring software, not backup software. The state of backup software is pathetic.

    19. Re:Can we get something for the consumers? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      reasonable cost with better reliability than my HDD arrays, even though they require a little more maintenance.

      HDD is only reliable if it's spinning and in an array that's scrubbing once a month. Otherwise a single disk fails at p=0.02 per year, which makes it impossible to bulid a large reliable offline library. LTO is enough more reliable that, using the same number of parity tapes, it can be scrubbed much less often while achieving a given size & reliability compared to a disk array.

      This is an important archival characteristic. It takes a lot of infrastructure to keep a disk array scrubbing: electricity, cooling, software. This makes your overall reliability situation more precarious than it would be with tape, which can survive longer in an unpowered warehouse, or weather a natural disaster that requires temporary shutdown/evacuation/etc.

      Needing to scrub the disks also means the disks must be writable and therefore subject to bugs or ransomware, while tapes can be made safer from 'rm -rf' accidents and hackers by unmounting them.

    20. Re:Can we get something for the consumers? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      The big problem with tape - forget price, forget capacity, forget software - is that it's sensitive to dust. You can get high capacity for relatively low cost, but the tape drives and library need to be in a climate controlled, dust controlled data centre. As soon as dust gets inside the tape drive in significant quantities, it's pretty much game over for the drive, and the data on any tapes that are loaded before the problem is identified and fixed.

      For the home environment, this makes modern tape a complete non-starter. And short of being able to make a tape drive for under about $3-400 that can handle the conditions of the typical home, whilst still storing at least a TB of data on a single cartridge, it will continue to be a non-starter.

      Don't get me wrong here. Tape is the absolute worst form of media for storing backups, with the exception of all the others that have been tried. I'd love to see it available for home use. I just have zero expectations that it will actually happen.

    21. Re:Can we get something for the consumers? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Stop buying crappy taiwanese discs and you won't have that problem.

    22. Re:Can we get something for the consumers? by ctilsie242 · · Score: 1

      This. It isn't like backup software is anything new. The best backup software I've seen would be Retrospect, because it did compression, deduplication, encryption, and it allowed one to move backed up data to new media, verify the data, expire old backups, move selected sets to WORM media, and so on. It was a great way to archive files because you could just put the files into it, hit "archive", and pretty much forget about it.

      Then, there are programs like NetBackup and TSM/Spectrum Protect, which have had deduplication for decades. Why isn't this common? The only program I know that allows multiple hosts to back up to a single repository is obnam, and after heavy testing, I had so much data lost, it wasn't worth continuing.

      Downside is that it stopped supporting virtually all Blu-Ray optical drives, and it is so expensive. So, the best we have on the consumer end is Veeam. Stuff like Macrium Reflect, Acronis TrueImage are OK... but I have had issues with both silently failing and not bothering to notify the user that backup jobs are not going on. However, none of these allow one to take older backed up files and move those to other media.

      Which leaves us with the tools available:

      Veeam -- best of breed, offers deduplication, encryption, compression, and bare metal recovery. For free. The more advanced features cost more. However, you do need some place to back up your data to... which is likely an external HDD or NAS, both of which are vulnerable to ransomware.

      Windows Server backup -- decent, but vulnerable to ransomware.

      CrashPlan/Mozy/Carbonite/BackBlaze/etc. Cloud computing is OK... but has not stood the test of time, and one's network connection may make a restore not feasible, or expensive (if one has to ask for a removable HDD with the data.) Plus, what is to stop a cloud provider from telling everyone to go pike off and shut down, or charge them at extreme rates if they want their data back. Cloud providers are like banks, before the 1929 crash... great and fun, but should something seriously happen, one is basically hosed.

      Sync/backup tools to a NAS -- Both Synology and QNAP have backup and folder/file sync tools to their products.

      For Macs, there is Time Machine... but that only backs up the root partition and OS drive.

      Linux, there is no way to image and restore the OS unless you do offline backups. However, there are a lot of good file/directory backup tools, be it using btrfs and snapshots, borg backup, plain old tar, or many other utilities.

      Yes, one can get protection with a mishmash of utilities, but an ideal would be a tape drive that you plug in, or one attached to a NAS so backups get dumped to disk (or SSD), then migrated to tape.

    23. Re:Can we get something for the consumers? by maestroX · · Score: 1

      Yes, now with seeking times under a day!

  5. Speed? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Anyone know how fast these things are? How long would it take to write and how long would it take to read 330 terabytes of data on a similar tape drive?

  6. Backup our brains! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Yay! Finally enough storage to save our brain on tape! It will be more popular than cryo.

  7. What about analog audio? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I wonder how better the SNR would be.

  8. No mention of speeds involved by millertym · · Score: 0

    While the space would be amazing for backups, if a single head can only write to the media within similar speed ranges of modern tape drives then this tech would be severely limited in actual day to day use in a data center. Large, static data. Which don't get me wrong there is plenty of need for backups for - but it couldn't replace your entire data center's backup strategy with a few drives. At least not without very high write speeds.

  9. Magnetic Tape... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    There's a problem with that. OTOH... Will the tape fit into my Walkman? I need more storage space for my Napster collection.

  10. Falling for the 'backup tape' meme by Rick+Schumann · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Back in the '90's and early 2000's I fell for the 'backup tape' meme three times. Every single time it ended the same way: Buy backup tapes. Put important stuff on them. Put them away. Some time later, you need something off the tape. Whoops, tape drive isn't working right anymore, not even with a new blank tape! Get a new tape drive. Whoops! Not compatible with your old tapes. Or, Whoops! It just won't read your old tapes, even though it's supposedly compatible! Throw out ALL THE TAPES because they're now useless junk and START OVER FROM SCRATCH. Repeat this THREE TIMES.

    Hundreds of dollars spent, each iteration.
    Never again.

    1. Re:Falling for the 'backup tape' meme by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Travan!

    2. Re: Falling for the 'backup tape' meme by Miamicanes · · Score: 2

      Verbatim's QIC-eXtra was the worst scam... bundled backup software that barely worked, and bundled recovery software with so many bugs, you basically *had* to buy their expensive premium version to have any hope of recovering more than a few random files... and even then, it broke with every new version of Win9x, and wasn't compatible with NT unless you bought their even MORE expensive "enterprise" edition. And some thirdparty backup tools would happily create backups on QIC-Xtra tapes, then crash after restoring the first few files (because they made assumptions that were broken by the longer tapes).

      IMHO, QIC-eXtra was the. single. worst. backup. medium. EVER.

      What I *really* want: a 100-disc carousel-type jukebox (like the ones they made for audio CDs in the late 90s), with BD-R optics instead and a non-proprietary API that encourages support by open-source backup software. 25-gig BD-R discs are fairly cheap now, and a 100-disc carousel could give you 2.5TB of ransomware-proof WORM storage.

    3. Re:Falling for the 'backup tape' meme by bws111 · · Score: 1

      You are talking about consumer level crap, where the primary goal is cheap. This is enterprise, which has quite a good track record with tape.

    4. Re: Falling for the 'backup tape' meme by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      What I *really* want: a 100-disc carousel-type jukebox (like the ones they made for audio CDs in the late 90s), with BD-R optics instead and a non-proprietary API that encourages support by open-source backup software. 25-gig BD-R discs are fairly cheap now, and a 100-disc carousel could give you 2.5TB of ransomware-proof WORM storage.

      It seems like a disk controller could have a write-once option jumper, and a 3TB disk would cost a hell of a lot less than your fancy carousel. There's a reason those things went away.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    5. Re:Falling for the 'backup tape' meme by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Exactly, and that is why it makes sense to just backup to external* hard-drives. They're way cheaper than any tape or optical media (let alone the drive). Then every few years buy new (larger) drives and toss/re-purpose the old ones. It's STILL cheaper than optical or tape.

      (*) I use internal drives that aren't mounted in the machine(s). I keep them in their shipping container and just plug them in when needed. I don't bother with proper external enclosures.

    6. Re:Falling for the 'backup tape' meme by Rick+Schumann · · Score: 1

      Uh-huh. I remember looking at the 'professional' level tape drives. You could buy a decent used car for what those cost. If you have to be a Fortune 500 company to afford it, why even mention it?

    7. Re:Falling for the 'backup tape' meme by bws111 · · Score: 1

      Because there are Fortune 500 companies that use this stuff. Are we only supposed to discuss consumer stuff?

    8. Re:Falling for the 'backup tape' meme by Solandri · · Score: 1

      This is something I really have to commend the optical disk makers for. The newest Bluray drives can still read DVDs and CDs. Heck, most of them can still burn CD-Rs.

      My master's thesis is stored on a Zip disk in some box in my garage. So is the Zip drive, but it didn't work when I switched my archival storage to CD-Rs a couple decades ago. OTOH those early CD-Rs are mostly still readable.

    9. Re: Falling for the 'backup tape' meme by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Why not just use any NAS with a script to chmod 755 the thing with a different root login? Or ZFS/BTRFS snapshots sent to an independently credentialed system?
      $350 gets you 8TB in a Synology.

    10. Re:Falling for the 'backup tape' meme by Trogre · · Score: 1

      Wow, I never had that problem even with 10 year old LTO tapes.

      You *threw* the tapes away? You never thought to borrow another compatible drive from someone?

      --
      "Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
    11. Re:Falling for the 'backup tape' meme by damaki · · Score: 1

      Yup, and if you want to have a perfectly peaceful mind, just encrypt these drives An encrypted drive left at a friend's place or at your workplace is just a great way to protect yourself from fire and stuff while not having to pay for a paranoid and expensive vault.
      Just do not forget to backup the encryption key too, separately ;)

      --
      Stupidity is the root of all evil.
    12. Re: Falling for the 'backup tape' meme by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Make a robotic arm setup with suction cups to move discs between two stacks and the drive, and place it into a cabinet.

    13. Re: Falling for the 'backup tape' meme by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      There are a variety of optical jukeboxes on this site

      http://www.opticaljukeboxes.com/disc-arxtor-1000-library/

      some have an integrated NAS server, others connect to a computer via SCSI. Some use Bluray, others UDO.

    14. Re:Falling for the 'backup tape' meme by PingPongBoy · · Score: 1

      > Whoops, tape drive isn't working right anymore

      yeah, the flaw in your technique is buying just one drive

      If you really want to keep your data safe, I would say prefer hard disks or dvd's over tape due to the fragility of tape. I had some good experiences with tape recovery; the drive was industrial quality, but that was only a year back in an era when hard drives were on the cusp of becoming cheap.

      --
      Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
  11. Nice, maybe. by Miamicanes · · Score: 1

    Hopefully, for the first time in years, we'll have a backup medium with the capacity to do a true full backup of everything... that's also fast enough to finish the job in less time than it takes to render the backup almost moot, with enough capacity to include plenty of forward error correction.

    Of course, if it satisfies the capacity, speed, and reliability criteria, it'll probably cost at least ten times as much as the computer it's being used to back up, and will thus effectively not exist for non-enterprise users.

    QIC was dreadful in every meaningful way. In some ways, the false sense of security it gave was almost worse than having no backup at all.

    DDS ("dat") was ok, but by the time it finally became semi-affordable, we were back to needing dozens of tapes to back up a single hard drive.

    By the time LTO replaced DDS, its capacity was hopelessly outstripped by hard drive capacity (nominal 800GB tapes, vs 4TB+ cheap hard drives).

  12. How to make me excited and sad in one sentence by DontBeAMoran · · Score: 2

    IBM and Sony cram up to 330 terabytes...

    Woo-hoo!

    into tiny tape cartridge

    D'oh!

    --
    #DeleteFacebook
  13. You beat me to it by flatulus · · Score: 1

    I was going to write a post nearly identical to yours. After about 3 generations of backup tape technology and not ONCE getting anything useful off a backup tape, I quit tape forever. Now I just try to keep my stuff under 1 TB (er, 2 TB, er, 3 TB) and image to a backup drive of the same capacity.

    1. Re:You beat me to it by jittles · · Score: 1

      I was going to write a post nearly identical to yours. After about 3 generations of backup tape technology and not ONCE getting anything useful off a backup tape, I quit tape forever. Now I just try to keep my stuff under 1 TB (er, 2 TB, er, 3 TB) and image to a backup drive of the same capacity.

      Yeah I keep my data down to about 2TB of just the most important (or difficult to reproduce) items. Then I use a tool to sync the data to external drives that are removed. I've got 3. One that stays in the fireproof safe and gets updated once every few months, one that stays in the safe and (theoretically) gets updated and rotated every 2 weeks. And one that stays in my desk drawer that gets synced every other week in rotation with the drive in the safe. In practice I usually just end up syncing every month or so when I have new pictures or whatever.

  14. Throughput speculation by pholan · · Score: 1

    While it would certainly be impressive if it delivered those numbers I strongly suspect that the final product will use a narrow set of heads and require multiple passes to fully access the tape. According to Wikipedia LTO 7 for example requires 112 passes to fully read or write a tape. Also, even if full width heads could be economically built it would be troublesome to sink or source data at that rate, and as far as I'm aware tape drives take a relatively long time to seek and restart streaming after a buffer under/over run.

  15. Not taking care of your disks... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    If you burn at the absolute slowest speed your drive supports, use quality media (m-disc, or archival grade optical... although I've just bought cheap stuff and kept it cool and dark and it has lasted...)

    The biggest things to ensuring long term stability of optical archival media is keeping it out of the sun, burning it at a slow rate of speed, and keeping it cool and protected. If you do these 4 things it will last you 20+ years (and yes I have CD-Rs that have now lasted since the late 90s! Y'know back before the scratch protect layers!)

    1. Re:Not taking care of your disks... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "If you burn at the absolute slowest speed your drive supports,..."

      Now suppose I want to finish backing up before the sun dies? At zero downtime or delay, minimum DVD write speed would take THREE MONTHS to back up even a relatively small 10TB dataset, and fill a bookcase with over 2000 DVDs.

  16. Obligatory conversion into meaningful units... by John+Allsup · · Score: 2

    Is that ten years worth of 1080p porn in your pocket, or...

    --
    John_Chalisque
  17. Most likely vaporware by u19925 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Before you get excited about this announcement, note that IBM and Sony has a history of announcing tape drive vaporware. Here is from wiki:

    "In 2011, Fujifilm and IBM announced that they had been able to record 29.5 billion bits per square inch with magnetic tape media developed using the BaFe particles and nanotechnologies, allowing drives with true (uncompressed) tape capacity of 35 TB.[18][19] The technology was not expected to be commercially available for at least a decade.

    In 2014, Sony and IBM announced that they had been able to record 148 gigabits per square inch with magnetic tape media developed using a new vacuum thin-film forming technology able to form extremely fine crystal particles, allowing true tape capacity of 185 TB.[20][21]"

    Even their 2011 announcement has not been brought to market yet.

    1. Re:Most likely vaporware by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You didn't even read the quotes you provided. It says right there that the 2011 tech wasn't expected to be available for at a decade. So once 2021 comes around we'll probably have to wait another decade, though if something else more promising comes up I'd imagine that would preempt continued development on the 2011 tech.

  18. One step closer to the 300 petabyte WOM by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    One step closer to the 300 petabyte Write Only Memory.

  19. Network backups by manu0601 · · Score: 1

    That leave a problem unsolved with backups: the time spent to transfer data from one random server to the tape. Even on high speed LAN with top of performance tape, it can take some time.

  20. It's worse than that Jim.. by LesserWeevil · · Score: 1

    ..it's dead. Tape is dead, Jim. It's a rare backup problem that can't be better solved by remote duplication.

  21. So what you're saying is by Togden · · Score: 1

    They have worked out how to store 50x as much data on a tape that costs 100x as much to make.