Storage Dilemma Looms for NASA

John Keeton writes "Guys, This story talks about how NASA is moving its data from tapes as old as seven tracks to newer media, but then they get done, they have to start moving it again to new media, and how they are falling behind, and may have to lose TB's worth of data.. Really interesting.." It says it will take them 4 years to move all the data to tapes that have a 6 year life expectancy. Hmmm.

Comments

Modern Tape Technology...

[slk]

Modern commercial tape technology, specifically DLT, has gotten very fast and reliable. While I realize most of you haven't dealt with anything larger than a peecee and therefore find real technology hard to deal with, it is out there. A Quantum DLT7000 drive, for under $5k, can write 35GB native (70GB compressed; onboard hardware compression) at 5MB/sec media speed. Also, according to Quantum's specs, a DLT cart has a storage life of "More than 30 year with less than 5% loss in demagnetization (at 20C and 40% non-condensing humidity)". DLT is very fast, reliable, reasonably priced (given what it does), and has been around for a while. If they're using DAT (or other helical scan technology) for all this data, they need to get their head(s) checked.

Optical?

[Bilbo]

Why don't they go to optical disk libraries? (I mean the big 14inch disks.)

I wonder about some of these time estimates though. Are they talking about the total time to copy all the tapes one at a time? Seems like they could just add more tape drives. The one bottleneck might be the fixed number of readers, since the formats are so old they can't buy new drives to read them...

(gack! The media loves to latch on to "disaster" stories. :-/)

Solution Sought for Brain Imaging Data Storage

[malpern]

Hi, I work in a Cogntive Neuro-Imaging lab at Princeton University. We use an fMRI scanner to image people while they're doing working memory tasks. Our work generates a substantial amount of data that needs to be archived. Our current need is to archive around 500 GB, but this figure will likely increase to 3 to 5 TB in the next two years. Our current plan includes investigating a Pioneer double sided DVD-R jukebox that should store 9.4 GB per disk and be available around this summer. We considered tape solutions but found them significantly more expensive (when we factoring in the cost of the robotics) for similar capacity. A DVD based solution also offers the promise of non-proprietary universal access. We would be very interested in any advice/suggestions that the Slashdot community has to offer about "reasonably priced" high capcity data archive solutions. Thank you.

Micah
malpern@princeton.edu

What about optical

[Tuor]

Is there any good optical storage medium they can take advantage of? CD's and MO have an incredible storage life.

Maybe they would have to use Laser Disc-sized DVD technology? Any other thoughts?

Why Tape?

[rnturn]

I read a similar story several years ago. NASA collects an enormous amount of data from the various probes that are wandering about the solar system. At that time, I'm not sure that CD-ROM was proven for data yet and they were placing everything onto magtape.

Now that CD-ROM is pretty well established, I can't see why it wouldn't be suitable for copying those old tapes onto. OK, OK, DVD will hold more but even CD-ROM will hold tons more than an old 9-track tape. A simple calculation (feel free to correct me if I messed up here) shows

(2400 * 12 * 6250) / 8 = up to about 21 MB

I'm guessing that a 9-track tape takes up about the same amount of shelf space as about 6-7 CD-ROMs. Let's see that's 21 MB vs. 3600-4200 MB. Looks to me like they gain back some floor/shelf space as well as longer life for the data.

The concern about access time can't be that legitimate. Robotic tape handlers aren't any faster than CD-ROM handlers/jukeboxes.

I hope NASA acts on this before those old tapes become totally unreadable. Loss of this data, IMHO, would be a catastrophe.