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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

#81

Post by throwaway2245 »

chrisseaton wrote: post #76
throwaway2245 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understood the exact opposite that you have understood, and I find your comment quite uncomfortable, as a result? The parent is clearly seeking to confirm serious long-term use, as you say, in considering the costs of failure cases.

> I understood the exact opposite that you have understood, and I find your comment quite uncomfortably presumptuous, as a result? Is this a question? I can't tell you if that's how you find my comment or not, sorry. They wants a cheap tape device because they just want to use it in the home. Tape devices aren't cheap... because they aren't aimed at use just in the home. They aren't aiming at home users - I think tha…

The parent clarifies above that they are not a home user.

Even if you believed they were a home user, they clearly demonstrated in their original comment that they did know that it was for long-term, high volume storage, and they did know the cost, and you appeared still to belittle them for not knowing.

It's a question in the sense of - why did you choose to say it in this way, which seemed impolite? What did you intend your comment to add?

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

#82

Post by ardy42 »

weare138 wrote: post #36
vondur wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> 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.

Those tapes only hold 200 GB, and you can get a 10 TB hard drive today for less than $300:

https://www.newegg.com/red-wd101efax-10tb/p/N82E16822234407

While tapes are theoretically cool, the the drives are just too rare for them to be of any practical value to a home user. Even if the media has a better archival life than a hard disk (say 50 years), it won't do you a damn bit of good if there are no drives available in 50 years to read it.

IMHO, hard drives are better for backup (even offline backup, just get a hot-swap bay and imagine the drive is tape [1]). Archival is a harder problem, but I've settled on using high-grade optical media, burned slow for fewer errors, making a bunch of redundant copies. Even though the media might not last as long, I'm pretty much guaranteed to be able to find a drive for the next several decades [2].

[1] "pretend this hard drive is a tape" is even an enterprise product: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RDX_Technology

[2] For instance, you can still attach a 5.25 floppy drive to a modern computer: https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=5.25+floppy+drive + http://www.deviceside.com/fc5025.html

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

#83

Post by ashton314 »

I remember watching the pilot episode of Star Trek (the original series) and chuckling when Spock reports that “the tapes are badly damaged” from the capsule they recovered near the barrier at the edge of the galaxy.

Turns out it might not be that outdated after all.

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

#84

Post by webmobdev »

wazoox wrote: post #70
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.

Sounds like a good idea. But I am guessing it failed as it wouldn't be attractive for common folks because, while the tapes might be affordable, tape drives are really expensive and uncommon.

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

#85

Post by Tsiklon »

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 :)

That would be wonderful, unfortunately the storage density of tape is dependent also on the magnetic particle in the tape; smaller particles which can be magnetised enable smaller heads, which in turn enable higher storage density.

I know your comment was a throwaway idea but I got a little bit too involved looking up information around this answer - so I've committed further and looked a little deeper to avoid looking too stupid: Currently with BaFe (Barium Ferrite) as their magnetic particle, LTO-7+ tapes have particle sizes less than 100nm in size (https://indico.cern.ch/event/637013/contributions/2669089/ - check out slides 14 and 15 in the powerpoint.).

VHS on the other hand is a little more tricky to find information on I suspect due to the age of the technologies involved it's going to be significantly bigger - but the closest I've found to a technical document is a student paper at NYU which refers to this IEEE Paper (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/50474) saying that the average particle size for VHS is ~300nm and for S-VHS at ~150nm.

But that first presentation also mentions smoothness increases over time with LTO, which suggests improvements in the coating process.

I suspect improvements in the coating, combined with both the size of magnetic particle shrinking, enabled an increase in density of particles on the tape. This in conjunction with improved thinness of the tapes enabled large increases in tape length for the same cartridge size (nearly double the length from LTO-1 -> LTO-8), has in turn led to the enormous jumps in capacity we've seen in LTO.

Meaning unfortunately I don't think it'll be possible to do super interesting things with VHS.

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

#86

Post by rualca »

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. This is not home market (...)

You're basing your argument on extreme and unrepresentative assumptions.

First of all, you do not need to fill a storage device to the brim to justify it's use. You can use the exact same rationale to claim no one needs 500GB HDs even though they are pretty much standard these days.

Additionally, you falsely assume that your data storage needs start the very moment someone buys a drive, and up till then they have no data lying around. That's not the case at all. People buy high-density storage devices because they already have the data lying around, and they don't want to lose it. You're ignoring that people already have piles of CDRs/DVDs/Blu-ray disks lying around.

Additionally, you are somehow assuming that people would buy storage devices for their density, ignoring their primary use case: long term data preservation.

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

#87

Post by klodolph »

dijit wrote: 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.

> Swapping tapes continues to be human intensive and restore times long.

Restore times are definitely long, but you can mostly avoid human labor by putting the tapes in a tape library, which will load tapes in the drives using robots. You still need technicians around because tapes / drives / robots will break, but individual restore operations can be completely automated.

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

#88

Post by SoSoRoCoCo »

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…

Totally! I have a friend who does sound engineering for hollywood and he has two firesafes full of HDDs, SSDs and TAPE with hundreds and hundreds of terabytes of data. I couldn't even finish the sentence "Have you tried the cl..." before he cut me off and was like: way too much data. Didnt have the heart to tell him two of those three media types need to be powered on periodically...

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

#89

Post by rahimnathwani »

w0mbat wrote: post #37
anonu wrote: post #22

If the tape was twice as long, it could hold 1.16 petabytes. That would have been a more interesting headline.

My reaction was that any kind of tape can hold 580 Terabytes if it's long enough.

How long would the tape from an audio (compact) cassette need to be, to hold 580TB?

How thick would that tape need to be to allow the motorized spool to pull the tape from the other (passive) spool?

Imagine you were to make an assembly that could hold two spools of this tape, how large would it be? It might be hard to fit it through the door of your server room. And it might not even fit in the van that carries away your off-site backups :)

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

#90

Post by webmobdev »

chrisseaton wrote: post #8
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 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?

> What am I missing?

Money - The cost factor of buying the new HDD. And to be safe, you need to have more than one medium. That's again more cost.

Time - Ensuring that your existing machine is compatible with both your old and new disks (IDE vs SATA or working DVD drives for example).

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