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IBM and Sony cram up to 330TB into tiny tape cartridge

arstechnica.co.uk

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Re: IBM and Sony cram up to 330TB into tiny tape cartridge

#21

Post by slazaro »

adtac wrote: post #18
brudgers wrote: post #4

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. --Tanenbaum

Let's do some XKCD what-if math because I love doing stuff like this. An average truck can house anywhere between 20,000L to 40,000L [1]. Let's take an average 30,000L. An average truck can also travel at anywhere in between 56 kph to 137 kph [2]. Let's take an average 100 kph. The tape catridge in the image looks like it's about 4mm x 10cm x 6 cm. And it can store 330 TB. Let's say we're transfering from New York to…

Wouldn't the bandwidth be close to infinte? As soon as the first byte gets there, the last byte also gets there. You'd have to account for the length of the truck and separation between consecutive trucks, right? The latency is simpler to calculate for sure.

Re: IBM and Sony cram up to 330TB into tiny tape cartridge

#22

Post by jandrese »

gruez wrote: post #20
adtac wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's do some XKCD what-if math because I love doing stuff like this. An average truck can house anywhere between 20,000L to 40,000L [1]. Let's take an average 30,000L. An average truck can also travel at anywhere in between 56 kph to 137 kph [2]. Let's take an average 100 kph. The tape catridge in the image looks like it's about 4mm x 10cm x 6 cm. And it can store 330 TB. Let's say we're transfering from New York to…

You need to factor in the time needed to transfer the data onto/off the drives.

It depends on what you're doing with the data. If you're moving it to some long term archive then you only need to count the write time of the disks at the source, packing time, and unpacking time.

If you're planning to actually use the data you need to add in the time need to read the tapes and put them on a usable medium.

Once you add in all of the overhead, the network comes out looking much better in comparison.

Re: IBM and Sony cram up to 330TB into tiny tape cartridge

#23

Post by brudgers »

gruez wrote: post #20
adtac wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's do some XKCD what-if math because I love doing stuff like this. An average truck can house anywhere between 20,000L to 40,000L [1]. Let's take an average 30,000L. An average truck can also travel at anywhere in between 56 kph to 137 kph [2]. Let's take an average 100 kph. The tape catridge in the image looks like it's about 4mm x 10cm x 6 cm. And it can store 330 TB. Let's say we're transfering from New York to…

You need to factor in the time needed to transfer the data onto/off the drives.

It is significantly less than the time required to lay the appropriate fiber coast to coast.

Re: IBM and Sony cram up to 330TB into tiny tape cartridge

#24

Post by Twirrim »

jandrese wrote: post #22
gruez wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need to factor in the time needed to transfer the data onto/off the drives.

It depends on what you're doing with the data. If you're moving it to some long term archive then you only need to count the write time of the disks at the source, packing time, and unpacking time. If you're planning to actually use the data you need to add in the time need to read the tapes and put them on a usable medium. Once you add in all of the overhead, the network comes out looking much better in comparison.

>Once you add in all of the overhead, the network comes out looking much better in comparison.

That's a broad assumption. There's a reason why AWS is finding demand for Snowball and Snowmobile. Internet connections just aren't that fast.

Re: IBM and Sony cram up to 330TB into tiny tape cartridge

#25

Post by FLUX-YOU »

jandrese wrote: post #22
gruez wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need to factor in the time needed to transfer the data onto/off the drives.

It depends on what you're doing with the data. If you're moving it to some long term archive then you only need to count the write time of the disks at the source, packing time, and unpacking time. If you're planning to actually use the data you need to add in the time need to read the tapes and put them on a usable medium. Once you add in all of the overhead, the network comes out looking much better in comparison.

Also the risk of the truck having an accident and having to "replay" everything.

Re: IBM and Sony cram up to 330TB into tiny tape cartridge

#26

Post by jandrese »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #14
jonatron wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open#Positioning_t... , in the region of 50 seconds, which isn't really good enough.

I'm sure there's long-tail data on YouTube for which terabytes of files that could be backed up to tape are accessed far more slowly than every 50 seconds. I agree that this would not be a great user experience, but there's certainly a place for it, especially if the cost/terabyte is compelling.

The other problem is that Hard Drives are cheap as hell and tapes, especially ones loaded into automatic robots, are really not that cheap.

It's the perennial disappointment with tape drives that the media has "enterprise" pricing, making it barely better per TB than cheap consumer spinning hard drives.

Re: IBM and Sony cram up to 330TB into tiny tape cartridge

#27

Post by jandrese »

Twirrim wrote: post #24
jandrese wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on what you're doing with the data. If you're moving it to some long term archive then you only need to count the write time of the disks at the source, packing time, and unpacking time. If you're planning to actually use the data you need to add in the time need to read the tapes and put them on a usable medium. Once you add in all of the overhead, the network comes out looking much better in comparison.

>Once you add in all of the overhead, the network comes out looking much better in comparison. That's a broad assumption. There's a reason why AWS is finding demand for Snowball and Snowmobile. Internet connections just aren't that fast.

In total bandwidth the truck is still likely to win, but it won't be a 75x advantage. Closer to 3-4x.

Also note that the Snowball/Snowmobile fit into the first use case. They are loaded up then just plugged in on arrival, and even then the total number of enterprises that have used the services is not very large. The multi-day latency on the first packet means you need to be transferring enough data that it would take more than those few days to transfer on a STM-4 or similar. It works out to a tremendous amount of data.

Of course if you are an arctic researcher who has collected hundreds of petabytes of sensor measurements and only have a satellite backhaul, then this makes tons of sense. But for anybody with a solid backbone connection the calculus is much less favorable.

Re: IBM and Sony cram up to 330TB into tiny tape cartridge

#28

Post by jandrese »

Shivetya wrote: post #16
tjoff wrote: post #7

Note 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 tra…

well the drives/etc we have for home use are magnitudes cheaper than commercial gear which only really has equivalence with regards to how much it stores. recently pricing out 337gb SSD drives for our production and backup servers ends up with a price about nine times that of which it would cost per terabyte of a new iMac. When you get into have 60 to 120TB it adds up but reliability is so much more important. Now I…

People who are really serious about storage like Google and Backblaze tend to buy those cheap commercial hard drives instead of the expensive enterprise drives.

Tape drives for home use don't make much sense sadly. The tapes are too expensive compared to hard drives. It's easier to buy one of those SATA docks if you want to have cold backups.

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E1681715...

Re: IBM and Sony cram up to 330TB into tiny tape cartridge

#30

Post by sgt »

I would love a low cost tape backup solution for home use. I would put things on it that I normally would delete (but may theoretically need at a later stage). This could range anything from written material (small size) to raw 4k video material that normally would require fairly expensive storage. What tape solutions like these are available right now at a decent cost? Thinking sizes up to 50TB, so conventional disks are just too expensive and error prone.
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