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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

#101

Post by webmobdev »

pizza234 wrote: post #32
jjulius wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>... 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.

Yes, I do use a mix of medium in case one medium fails.

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

#102

Post by tomcam »

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.

First off, mad props for building out the service. That was an ambitious idea and I’m sorry it didn’t take off. Second, if you ever write a blog or article about it someday please mention it on hacker news.

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

#103

Post by pochamago »

SoSoRoCoCo wrote: post #88
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...

HDDs can't require powering all that periodically. I just found my hard drive from college, and plugging it into my computer just worked. Great finding all my old documents and music that I'd forgotten about.

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

#104

Post by klodolph »

ardy42 wrote: post #82
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

> 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 t…

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

That was a link to an obsolete LTO-2 drive. If you’re using LTO-8, which is the current generation, you’d get a 10-pack of 12TB tapes for around $500. Noticeably cheaper per byte than hard drives.

I don’t recommend LTO-2 just because I don’t think that the drives are well-supported.

> 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.

If you’re evaluating just on the basis of the price of drives / media, then there’s a cutoff where tape becomes cheaper than hard drives. The easy way to calculate this cutoff is to divide the overhead cost (tape drive price) by the difference in the cost per TB of tapes and hard drives, which in the example here, is around $3k divided by $25/TB, or 120 TB.

In other words, if you have more than about 120 TB of data, then it is cheaper to buy a tape drive. I think any comments about whether tape drives are suitable for home use are really comments about whether you are interested in the use case of people who need to store >120 TB at home.

If you are running a YouTube channel as a hobby, or you run a side business doing videography for weddings, the tape drive starts to sound a lot better. The 120 TB cutoff might be around 300 hours of video, which might be only 50 events.

There are a lot of other reasons why you might NOT want to use tape, but it’s easy to have enough data that tape is the cheapest storage option. At “enterprise” scale the cost calculus is completely different and involves things like support contracts with Oracle (not necessary for hard drives), power/cooling in your DC (tape is very low-power), etc.

And let’s not forget that if you have 120TB of hard drives, you’re in the regime where you start having to buy multiple machines.

As for longetivity—I don’t have the data handy. If you are storing data on tape, you need to migrate to newer generations of tape, as old generations become obsolete and unavailable. If you are storing on hard disks, you also need to migrate because hard disks eventually fail (even if they are not powered on).

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

#105

Post by webmobdev »

chrisseaton wrote: post #27
jjulius wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP explicitly mentioned HDDs in their post; they do not want to be transferring data to a new HDD every year, or two years, or five years.

Well that's why I asked what I'm missing! It's just one command to copy from an old HD to the new HD? Takes me all of 30 mins once a year.

You have to save your important data in multiple mediums to keep it safe. This is in case one medium fails. Obviously, cost being a factor, optical disks is one of the mediums to be considered despite all its other downsides (slow transfer speed).

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

#106

Post by dragontamer »

monocasa wrote: post #95
dragontamer wrote: post #68

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 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).

Hard Drives are going 220MB/s and people still think they're too slow.

I just gave a look at the first Blu Ray media on Newegg.com. Here's what is search #1: https://www.newegg.com/verbatim-6x-25gb-bd-r/p/N82E168171301...

That's 6x speed, or roughly 25MB/s. You can store 25GBs per disk and it is going to take 1000% longer than a $150 5TB Hard Drive AND you're going to have to sit there and remove / add a new disk every few minutes.

And for what? The hard drive is cheaper after all of that.

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

#107

Post by tomcam »

throwaway201103 wrote: post #67
pizza234 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 actua…

> 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.

That is a completely logical take. However, I sort of think of it as a posterity move. Although my kids might not particularly want to see pictures of themselves, their great grand children—or beyond—might love it. I would pay a pretty penny to see home movies of my grandparents, whom I never knew.

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

#108

Post by webmobdev »

chrisseaton wrote: post #13
sgt wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every year you buy a new HD and yet the cost is basically zero?

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.

You miss the point - consumer tape drives won't cost 5k, just like consumer HDD's are cheaper than enterprise HDD's.

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

#109

Post by tomcam »

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

I cheerfully quantify just about everything in my life, yet somehow I missed that one. I am a little bit of a data hoarder, or maybe just a little paranoid. Seeing those numbers is actually quite helpful. Thank you.

PS I get downvoted a lot for comments like this, so in case it sounds sarcastic or facetious, it is not. I mean it sincerely.

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

#110

Post by LASR »

ashton314 wrote: post #83

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.

About a month ago found a stack of MiniDV tapes from about 15 years ago.

It was my own home videos. I wanted to preserve them, so wanted to upload them to Google Photos.

It took me some looking around in eBay to find a camcorder to play these back. When it came home, I realized that I needed a FireWire 400 port to capture full resolution. So more digging around for a FireWire PCI-E card. I was finally able to transcode and upload some 15GB worth of video. It took 3 minutes on my gigabit internet for the upload. About a month for the whole process acquiring the hardware etc.

When I think about these tapes some 50 years from now, it might as well be completely unrecoverable, not because the tapes went bad, but because we have nothing to read them. Makes you wonder about galactic time scales like in Star Trek.

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