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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

#91
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first person pronoun you used ("I") strongly implied personal use.

No, it just means the person has the ability to purchase. They could be purchasing it for themselves or on the behalf of another organization.

I accept that, in a literal sense.

I was attempting only to answer the question and explain the source of confusion.

In native English speech, it would usually be expected that a business-case purchasor would speak of a more general case, perhaps by using "we".

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

#92
post #56

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

The first tape drive is a 200GB (native / uncompessed) internal SCSI drive. Not so easy for a consumer with a laptop to use. The tapes are pretty cheap at $8 on Amazon if you buy 20.

Well they don't really make these things for laptops unfortunately but they also don't cost $25k+ like they used to. It's still more than the average consumer is willing to spend but they are affordable enough now to be a viable option for professionals and small businesses.

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

#93

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 u…

SSD and flash storage can have their own issues. For long term unpowered storage there might be issues with data retention. Not so much with magnetic media. And with bad drivers there is risk of ruining parts of disk by writing too many times...

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

#94
post #37
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.

Yeah! Somehow my brain started to channel Shakespeare and say "Why, so can I, and so can any man, be the tape but long enough!"

(Then I had to look it up. Henry IV Part I, Act III, Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep; Hotspur: Why so can I, and so can any man, but will they come when you do call them?)

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

#95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$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…

16x bluray is 72MB/s (576Mb/s).

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

#96

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.

Well, nowadays digital documents, such as videos and photos, are much more important and widespread and mundane than they were a couple of decades ago.

During the 80s there was no digital consumer camera market. Nowadays every person can easily generate hundreds of megabytes of photos and videos per day. Each hour of a 4K video can be close to 7GB, and we're already seeing cellphones which are able to record 4K video at 60fps and 1080p videos at 240fps.

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

#97

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.

Shucks - It was too early for its time. Did they even have RAM in MB's during the 80's? :)

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

#98

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…

AWS Glacier?

The post you were replying to specifically didn't want to use "the cloud." But for single-digit TB, which covers consumers who don't either have a huge number of video files or is a serious data hoarder, the answer is the use local disks. And,if they are OK with cloud storage which they probably should be, something like Backblaze is probably a better choice.

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

#99
Aw, c'mon chaps! Can we just admire the tech for a second?

> Data on the tape is stored at a record-breaking density of 317 gigabytes per square inch...

> When tape is being read it is streamed over the head at a speed of about 15 km/h and with our new servo technologies we are still able to position the tape head with an accuracy that is about 1.5 times the width of a DNA molecule.

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

#100

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...

Ow! Telling him would be a kindness.
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