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.
Fujifilm Created a Magnetic Tape That Can Store 580 Terabytes
31–40 of 335 posts
Re: Fujifilm Created a Magnetic Tape That Can Store 580 Terabytes
#32Earlier 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...
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
#33We 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…
Re: Fujifilm Created a Magnetic Tape That Can Store 580 Terabytes
#34That'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 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
#35That'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
#36Great, 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
#37If the tape was twice as long, it could hold 1.16 petabytes. That would have been a more interesting headline.
Re: Fujifilm Created a Magnetic Tape That Can Store 580 Terabytes
#38We 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…
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
#39Earlier 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.
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?