Live data from Hacker News

Fujifilm Created a Magnetic Tape That Can Store 580 Terabytes

petapixel.com

31–40 of 335 posts

Re: Fujifilm Created a Magnetic Tape That Can Store 580 Terabytes

#31
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah what does a new HD cost? Like £100 max for a big high quality one? Compared to buying a £5k tape drive and expensive tapes... yeah that's basically zero.

$100 is definitely not "basically zero". Not only that, but a $5k tape drive and tapes are designed to last a significantly longer period of time, essentially bringing the cost of long-term storage closer to $0/year than your option of spending $100/year.

5k amortized at 100/year is 50 years to get your money's worth. It seems 100/year is a much better deal. I don't see your math working out...

Re: Fujifilm Created a Magnetic Tape That Can Store 580 Terabytes

#32
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

>... every year I buy a new HD... OK, but OP said: >It's really a pain to keep transferring your old backups every 2-5 years...

The OP is mixing mediums with different characteristics. The DVD has a fixed size (say, 5.x GB), while hard disks are relatively open-ended. One can buy 10+ TB magnetic disks for a cheap price (less than 200$).

If the OP really needs dozens of TBs of capacity every few year, they definitely don't fit in the home user market they are talking about.

Re: Fujifilm Created a Magnetic Tape That Can Store 580 Terabytes

#33
post #3

We 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…

The entire libgen archive is roughly 50 terabytes (most of the books ever written). It will be a very long time before we reach that level of storage in a phone.

Re: Fujifilm Created a Magnetic Tape That Can Store 580 Terabytes

#34

That'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…

The solution is generally to not be doing full duplicative backups but to check hashes between already backed up files and new files, only backing up what you need.

I don't recommend backing up to HDD's. They are prone to early failure from portable use because of vibration and drops.

What we need are more affordable sata SSD's. Currently nvme SSD's are very close to the same price.

If you could sell a 1TB portable usb 3/usb c backup device that comes with good software the vast majority of people would be set.

Re: Fujifilm Created a Magnetic Tape That Can Store 580 Terabytes

#35

That'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?

Normal people don't know what a checksum is.... or they think that's the amount their paid every week from the bank.

Re: Fujifilm Created a Magnetic Tape That Can Store 580 Terabytes

#36
post #4
post #2

Great, 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.

The prices are much cheaper now. You can get a single tape drive for under $300 and enterprise grade single tape drives for under $3k.

https://www.newegg.com/p/2BM-000A-000M5

https://www.provantage.com/quantum-tc-l72an-br~7QUAT0JW.htm

Re: Fujifilm Created a Magnetic Tape That Can Store 580 Terabytes

#38
post #3

We 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…

This will never, ever happen. English Wikipedia (w/o pictures) copressed is measly 20 GB. It is hard to quantify "all books ever written", but I have kept copies of some online libraries large enough that they for sure have pretty much every book you can remember and 10 000 you never heard of for every single book you can remember. It's not that much, you can fit it on 1 or 2 regular HDDs.

Now, I did it because I'm that type of guy. There's not that many people who actually do this bullshit, even though it's perfectly doable.

So why don't they? Because it doesn't make much sense, if you aren't afraid of upcoming nuclear winter. Wikipedia is updated and improved every day. You only sometimes want to refer to something old, but you nearly always want to check out something new. Petabytes of video are uploaded to Youtube every year. Probably TB/day wouldn't be an overestimation for audio on Spotify. All data is being updated constantly.

Also, the above is valid for pretty aggressive data compression. Is aggressively compressed data what we want? No. 2h video compressed into about 500 MB was totally fine 15 years ago. If I download a 2h movie today, it's normally around 20 GB. And by no means it's uncompressed.

Seriously, by now you should know for a fact, that if one believes there's such thing as "too much storage space" — he's stuck in the 80s.

And even if there would be such thing — realistically, a cluster of nodes in Google's datacenters can find you a book or a video you are looking for way faster than the most perfect HDD you could theoretically have locally. So, again, normal people wouldn't want to have all this stuff even if they could.

Re: Fujifilm Created a Magnetic Tape That Can Store 580 Terabytes

#39
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah what does a new HD cost? Like £100 max for a big high quality one? Compared to buying a £5k tape drive and expensive tapes... yeah that's basically zero.

$100 is definitely not "basically zero". Not only that, but a $5k tape drive and tapes are designed to last a significantly longer period of time, essentially bringing the cost of long-term storage closer to $0/year than your option of spending $100/year.

> a $5k tape drive and tapes are designed to last a significantly longer period of time

You're going to use the drive for 50 years? 50 years? Half a century? And you think it'll be working and supporting a format with a useful capacity in half a century?

Re: Fujifilm Created a Magnetic Tape That Can Store 580 Terabytes

#40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you do this manual checksumming thing instead of e.g. setting up a ZFS mirror once every n years?

Because simple and manually inspectable is better for backups.

What do you do if you find a checksum error? ZFS mirror will fix it for you.
Post reply on HN