IBM and Sony cram up to 330TB into tiny tape cartridge
arstechnica.co.uk
IBM and Sony cram up to 330TB into tiny tape cartridge
1–10 of 49 posts
Re: IBM and Sony cram up to 330TB into tiny tape cartridge
#2They should copy Soundcloud's 900TB as a demo
Re: IBM and Sony cram up to 330TB into tiny tape cartridge
#3Can anyone speculate about the price for one unit?
Re: IBM and Sony cram up to 330TB into tiny tape cartridge
#4Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. --Tanenbaum
Re: IBM and Sony cram up to 330TB into tiny tape cartridge
#5Can anyone speculate about the price for one unit?
Price per TB would be the more important measure for this kind of storage equipment.
For reference and to put things in context one has to look at LTO generations. From what I see their invention would fall beyond the LTO-10 standard (unless the market forces and manufacturing change dramatically by then).
Re: IBM and Sony cram up to 330TB into tiny tape cartridge
#6One of the main reasons tape is still used in scientific applications is its durability and robustness when transported, the price of the cartridges is less of a factor.
In exploration geophysics extremely large amounts of data are recorded onto tapes when acquiring in the field, and then either transferred over sea/land/air in a packing case to a processing centre. I wonder if this new tech will prove just as durable as current tape tech?
Re: IBM and Sony cram up to 330TB into tiny tape cartridge
#7Note that commercial tape cartridges max out at 15TB - so, less than the theoretical amount enabled by the 2010 breakthrough.
Will be a long time and quite expensive when/if these finally hit the market.
I would love to store backups on tape at home. Unfortunately harddrives are still the cheapest option in practice, and they are a bit too expensive and a bit impractical to comfortably use as offline storage (and transfer) for home use (my opinion / use case).
Re: IBM and Sony cram up to 330TB into tiny tape cartridge
#8Can anyone speculate about the price for one unit?
Hard to say. That type of capacity isn't even on the LTO road map yet, and IBM is one of the controlling companies there.
LTO-7 currently holds about 6TB uncompressed, and they're about $100 per cartridge. LTO-8 will double the storage, and will probably be available by the end of next year. I'd guess the cartridges will be more expensive initially, but it's hard to say what the premium will be.
Re: IBM and Sony cram up to 330TB into tiny tape cartridge
#9It can now store 330 million books. We better get started writing!
Re: IBM and Sony cram up to 330TB into tiny tape cartridge
#10Honest question: are tape drives fast enough for use in any asynchronous/random-access environment, or are they generally limited to backups, financial and scientific data? For example, could something like Youtube rely on tapes as the tail end of a LRU cache or similar?