Fujifilm Created a Magnetic Tape That Can Store 580 Terabytes
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Re: Fujifilm Created a Magnetic Tape That Can Store 580 Terabytes
#2Great, so when can I buy one and how much will the tape drive cost?
The largest issue with tape is that the drives themselves cost absurd amounts, and you better not cheap out because failure is both time consuming and scary.
Swapping tapes continues to be human intensive and restore times long. But the tapes themselves are so cheap that at this scale it becomes worthwhile again.
Re: Fujifilm Created a Magnetic Tape That Can Store 580 Terabytes
#3We reached an inflection 'amazing!' point when we are able to put '100 songs in your pocket'. That was really a shocking thing given the limitations of CD/Tape etc..
But the real inflection point may come when 'all relevant information in your local disk'. The tapes here in question can maybe store every book every written!
We may be able to put the entirety of Wikipedia, every film, TV Show ever made, every book every lecture on a little disk.
The only thing we'd need to access in realtime would be contemporary data like traffic flows, weather situation etc..
The ability to store 'that much data quickly and easily' locally, may quite fundamentally change the equilibrium we have right now with the cloud and lead to a more natural decentralization.
"All of YouTube from 2008 until the present, 99 cents at the local gas station, on usb-like contraption"
Re: Fujifilm Created a Magnetic Tape That Can Store 580 Terabytes
#4Great, so when can I buy one and how much will the tape drive cost? The largest issue with tape is that the drives themselves cost absurd amounts, and you better not cheap out because failure is both time consuming and scary. Swapping tapes continues to be human intensive and restore times long. But the tapes themselves are so cheap that at this scale it becomes worthwhile again.
This is geared for enterprise settings, not home use. I believe someone mentioned these drives costing $25,000. I do agree reasonably priced tape drives with TB of space for home users would be great.
Re: Fujifilm Created a Magnetic Tape That Can Store 580 Terabytes
#5That's good. But when will it ever move out of the enterprise market?
What I really want is an affordable Tape storage for us common folks / home users to archive data long term. It's really a pain to keep transferring your old backups every 2-5 years to a new CD / DVD / portable HDD. There is a market for home users that really don't want to put their data on the "cloud". And this generation is really creating so much data, some of which, I am sure they would like to store long-term.
Re: Fujifilm Created a Magnetic Tape That Can Store 580 Terabytes
#6Great, so when can I buy one and how much will the tape drive cost? The largest issue with tape is that the drives themselves cost absurd amounts, and you better not cheap out because failure is both time consuming and scary. Swapping tapes continues to be human intensive and restore times long. But the tapes themselves are so cheap that at this scale it becomes worthwhile again.
Doesn't really sound like it's aimed at you. Tape is for serious long-term, high-volume storage. If you've got a limited budget for the tape device it's probably not designed for you in the first place.
Re: Fujifilm Created a Magnetic Tape That Can Store 580 Terabytes
#7We reached an inflection 'amazing!' point when we are able to put '100 songs in your pocket'. That was really a shocking thing given the limitations of CD/Tape etc.. But the real inflection point may come when 'all relevant information in your local disk'. The tapes here in question can maybe store every book every written! We may be able to put the entirety of Wikipedia, every film, TV Show ever made, every book eve…
Love that last line! Wonder what will happen drm wise in the future if we get to this point.
Re: Fujifilm Created a Magnetic Tape That Can Store 580 Terabytes
#8That's good. But when will it ever move out of the enterprise market? What I really want is an affordable Tape storage for us common folks / home users to archive data long term. It's really a pain to keep transferring your old backups every 2-5 years to a new CD / DVD / portable HDD. There is a market for home users that really don't want to put their data on the "cloud". And this generation is really creating so mu…
I store on an external HD, and every year I buy a new HD and copy across to it and verify checksums against my records. Costs basically zero and low-effort. What am I missing?
Re: Fujifilm Created a Magnetic Tape That Can Store 580 Terabytes
#9Great, so when can I buy one and how much will the tape drive cost? The largest issue with tape is that the drives themselves cost absurd amounts, and you better not cheap out because failure is both time consuming and scary. Swapping tapes continues to be human intensive and restore times long. But the tapes themselves are so cheap that at this scale it becomes worthwhile again.
Is it possible to buy tape drives in the 2nd hand market for a reasonable price?
Re: Fujifilm Created a Magnetic Tape That Can Store 580 Terabytes
#10Last I looked into this, if you had a lot of data to back up (Say 1 Gbyte per second, continuous, with a retention time of 1 year), it was still far cheaper to simply use hard drives. One employee can keep up with all drive replacements, hardware setup, etc with time to spare. Drives aren't super power hungry, so any old office building is suitable. Encrypt the drive contents on another site so you don't need 24/7 security. Total system cost was sub $1M with a running cost of $500k/year and storage of 50PB. Bargain.
Now that GDPR applies, most companies need to rewrite backups every 30 days anyway to remove data where a GDPR deletion request applies. That tips the scale further in the direction of always spinning hard drives. Just hook up 64 drives to each machine, make sure you only do streaming writes of 1Gb+ files, do some ZFS raid-like scheme, and away you go.