> when not in use, tape requires no energy unlike hard disks and flash, IBM writes IBM marketing smort
You mean you haven't been keeping your hard disks plugged into a power source at all times? Say goodbye to your data! /s
Fujifilm Created a Magnetic Tape That Can Store 580 Terabytes
161–170 of 335 posts
Re: Fujifilm Created a Magnetic Tape That Can Store 580 Terabytes
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 transco…
> found a stack of MiniDV tapes from about 15 years ago ... I wanted to preserve them Here's where I raise my hand and ask "Why?" They've been sitting in a box for 15 years. You never watched them, you never even thought about them. Why preserve them? It's why I stopped taking pictures and videos of things. I never watched them again. It's all just a lot of waste motion over some dream that someday we'll find value i…
Just because you don't doesn't mean other people don't. May as well condemn someone for following a sport you don't like.
Re: Fujifilm Created a Magnetic Tape That Can Store 580 Terabytes
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
Given the pace at which storage capacity increases, what is the rationale for not copying over your data every 5-10 years onto the next cheapest consumer mass storage of the moment? You get all your data in one place and you don’t have to deal with standards disappearing (I read 2020’s game consoles can’t read CDs anymore, people should rip their CD collection right now).
The time needed to actually do the copying.
It seems like there may be a market there.
Every 10 to 15 years, you send in your archived (and new/interim) personal data and get it back on the current top-tech storage medium. That way it's not stored in the cloud and you can keep moving the stored data forward without having to deal with it all yourself.
Re: Fujifilm Created a Magnetic Tape That Can Store 580 Terabytes
#164Aw, 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.
> 15 km/h The tape stores 580TB for a length of 1255m, does that mean the read speed is 580TB/1255m*15km/h = 1.9TB/s ? Seems too high.
I'm guessing that is the fastest it can traverse the tape, it didn't say it could read at that speed.
Re: Fujifilm Created a Magnetic Tape That Can Store 580 Terabytes
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 15 km/h The tape stores 580TB for a length of 1255m, does that mean the read speed is 580TB/1255m*15km/h = 1.9TB/s ? Seems too high.
I'm guessing that is the fastest it can traverse the tape, it didn't say it could read at that speed.
> When tape is being read it is streamed over the head at a speed of about 15 km/h...
It did say that. I wonder if there's some multi-track/double-layer/double-sided stuff going on that needs multiple passes to read, that does sound awful fast!
Re: Fujifilm Created a Magnetic Tape That Can Store 580 Terabytes
#166I'm more interested in the lifetime of the medium. Durable backup media for consumers is still a holy grail as I understand. M-DISC didn't hold up to their 1000 year lifetime promise. Archival-grade DVD's are also not good enough as I understand. Syylex went bankrupt. I want a consumer-grade backup medium that can provide at least a 100 years of lifetime. That said, I was able to recover 90% of the voice recordings m…
There really isn't much market for it. You can pay Google or Apple or one of the large cloud providers a very reasonable and decreasing rate for a literal guarantee that your data is accessible. The only risk is the company goes under, which is extraordinarily unlikely for someone like Google / Apple and the shutdown would have advance notice.
I realize for the hacker news audience there are multitudes of reasons the solution above doesn't fit your needs, but realize the consumer market is near nonexistent.
Re: Fujifilm Created a Magnetic Tape That Can Store 580 Terabytes
#167I'm more interested in the lifetime of the medium. Durable backup media for consumers is still a holy grail as I understand. M-DISC didn't hold up to their 1000 year lifetime promise. Archival-grade DVD's are also not good enough as I understand. Syylex went bankrupt. I want a consumer-grade backup medium that can provide at least a 100 years of lifetime. That said, I was able to recover 90% of the voice recordings m…
Hell, tell me it will last 20 years and I'm okay with that, if you can guarantee at least 15 years I can then buy replacements every decade and transfer files over...
Re: Fujifilm Created a Magnetic Tape That Can Store 580 Terabytes
#168Mercifully, there was no requisite simpleton analogy like "that is the equivalent of stacking VHS tapes to the moon" or some idiotic thing like that.
>To put 580 terabytes in perspective, it’s roughly the equivalent of 120,000 DVDs or 786,977 CDs — IBM notes that stacking that many CDs would result in a tower 3,097 feet (944m) tall, or taller than Burj Kalifa, the world’s tallest building.
How many CDs can you stack on top each other before the one at the bottom fails?
Re: Fujifilm Created a Magnetic Tape That Can Store 580 Terabytes
#169Time for the ever golden quote: Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Andrew_S._Tanenbaum
Doing some guestimation, it seems like you could fit an exabyte into an AWS snowmobile. That's insane
Re: Fujifilm Created a Magnetic Tape That Can Store 580 Terabytes
#170Aw, 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.
> Data on the tape is stored at a record-breaking density of 317 gigabytes per square inch Me wondering about those micro SD cards that can store 1Tb.
Fair enough but chances are the tapes will have a much longer lifetime for storing data, which is the primary use case for this sort of thing.