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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

#61

Post by jdofaz »

agumonkey wrote: post #25
webmobdev wrote: post #5

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…

Let's have someone invents a ultra high def head to repurpose all the old VCRs and VHS tapes :)

D-VHS was a thing, tape capacity started at 25GB

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

#62

Post by bluedino »

webmobdev wrote: post #5

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…

Home users had tape backups since the 80’s.

The problem was, nobody actually backs up so not enough people bought tapes/drives so they quit making them.

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

#63

Post by segfaultbuserr »

pizza234 wrote: post #51
webmobdev wrote: post #5

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…

A 12 TB HDD requires 10 GB/day for three years to be filled. This is not home market, it's professional market or hoarding (by today's standards). Objections on the failure rate of HDDs are absolutely valid, but then one should also need to consider the bigger picture (e.g. storage loss), in which case, having a remote copy is also important.

> A 12 TB HDD requires 10 GB/day for three years to be filled. [...] hoarding (by today's standards).

You have an interesting argument - by the same reasoning, when one has eventually filled up a 12 TB HDD, it would no longer be hoarding by tomorrow's standard. In other words, at this point, one should be able to get the next generation of HDDs for cheap, and it's this fact that makes all tape drives unnecessary.

Now I wonder whether it was a mistake for me to buy a spare 14 TB HDD to 1:1 mirror my new file server for cold backup. Perhaps a smaller one should be good for 5 years anyway...

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

#65

Post by foolmeonce »

Invictus0 wrote: post #33
jariel wrote: 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.

I'm not sure what you mean by a very long time. We have 1tb microsdxc now and it is about 1000 times the capacity of sdcards available in 2005.

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

#66

Post by est31 »

monocasa wrote: post #60
est31 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's precisely what you need if you want to upload some backups from NAS systems or similar.

$100 each starts making way less sense when they have the same semantics as a burned optical discs for home users. These days the main benefit to tape is the physical safety of having the media be inside a cartridge, and the streaming read speeds are stupid fast so you can reconstruct a backup faster. Home use, even with a data hoarder sized NAS, is better served with a bluray burner with multiple copies.

Storing even 5 TB of data onto bluray disks requires 100 disks of 50 GB dual layer capacity. That's a lot of disks.

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

#67

Post by throwaway201103 »

pizza234 wrote: post #51
webmobdev wrote: post #5

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…

A 12 TB HDD requires 10 GB/day for three years to be filled. This is not home market, it's professional market or hoarding (by today's standards). Objections on the failure rate of HDDs are absolutely valid, but then one should also need to consider the bigger picture (e.g. storage loss), in which case, having a remote copy is also important.

> 12 TB HDD ... This is not home market,

Indeed. The home directory on my PC at home has 80GB of files stored. Most of it is just there out of laziness. About the only thing I try to keep backups of are my tax returns.

What do people have on a home machine that needs enterprise-grade backups?

You might say photos and videos. I guess that's a personal thing; I realized a long time ago that I never spent any time actually looking at any of the pictures I took, so I stopped taking them.

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

#68

Post by dragontamer »

monocasa wrote: post #60
est31 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's precisely what you need if you want to upload some backups from NAS systems or similar.

$100 each starts making way less sense when they have the same semantics as a burned optical discs for home users. These days the main benefit to tape is the physical safety of having the media be inside a cartridge, and the streaming read speeds are stupid fast so you can reconstruct a backup faster. Home use, even with a data hoarder sized NAS, is better served with a bluray burner with multiple copies.

> $100 each starts making way less sense when they have the same semantics as a burned optical discs for home users.

These tape-drives have 300MB/s+ of read/write speed. Sequential yes, but almost all backup tasks are sequential.

Optical has 10MB/s or so. You get more out of a 100Mbps connection to (insert cloud storage provider here), let alone Gbps.

At a minimum, a modern, reasonable mechanism for backups needs to be faster than cloud (100Mbps or Gbps), otherwise its basically worthless to the consumer. Hard drives and Tape get there, but there was no real way to improve Optical's read/write performance (outside of overengineered "jukebox" robots available to Facebook and a few other select groups), so it went fully obsolete.

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

#69

Post by segfaultbuserr »

monocasa wrote: post #54
weare138 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That $300 drive is an LTO-2 drive. It's so old that it's parallel SCSI. I'd be surprised if you could even get tapes for it that aren't sketch grey market stuff that you wouldn't want to use for backups anyway.

One day I found a really cheap LTO-4 drive that costed $150. Interesting, but I found it was not practical despite the price and decided against it. First, an 800 GB LTO-4 tape is no longer high density by today's standard, it couldn't even hold a 1 TB HDD image, also, I still had to pay for the necessary SAS peripherals to get it working, finally, the mechanical assembly inside a 10-year-old tape drive was not something that inspires confidence for data backup... Last time I've looked up, the cheapest decommissioned LTO-5 drive still costs $1000.

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

#70

Post by wazoox »

webmobdev wrote: post #5

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 built such a cloud service; you can archive the data uploaded on our cloud storage to tape on demand, and we'll send you the tape back when requested (you basically buy the tapes once, and they're yours, no string attached). It failed to gain any traction, though.
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