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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

#171
post #136

I'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…

Wouldn’t the other risk be that after you’re dead and stop paying the data is deleted or inaccessible? Maybe if you could prepay 100 years it’d work?

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

#173
post #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.

> 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.

Those SD cards aren't close to a single layer, so it's not really equivalent.

Ad absurdum, stacking two Micro SD cards on top of one another hasn't just doubled your density even though surface area is unchanged.

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

#174
post #30
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That didn’t add up. 1GB per second for a month is 2.6PB. Do you have a source of 40TB disk drives?

"to each machine" implies that there's more than one machine with 64 drives attached.

And I'm pretty sure "any old office building" means buying a large office or small office building and filling it up with them.

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

#176
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.

In English, when purchasing on behalf of a corporation, “we” would almost always be used.

“we” is even frequently employed by auctors writing papers to depersonalize.

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

#177
post #158
post #136

I'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…

Is there a source regarding M-DISC being unable to hold up to their lifetime promise? A quick google search brings up amateur-ish blog posts, and even those co sign the medium.

Yes, French national metrology and testing laboratory LNE: https://www.lne.fr/sites/default/files/inline-files/syylex-g...

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

#178
post #152
post #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.

> 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.

Tapes are often structured in bands, and those bands are divided into wraps, and those wraps are divided into tracks. There are many tracks on a tape, and they snake back and forth from end to end on the wrap (so you don't need to "rewind" when you get to the end of the tape—you just start reading back in the other direction). In newer tape drives, you physically can't read all of the data at once because the tape head is only a fraction of the width of a single band: it physically moves (laterally) to position itself over the right data.

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

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Most recent tape standards have multiple "bands" and "wraps" placed in parallel. The head reads only one wrap at a time, so it takes many passes to read the whole tape. For example an LTO-8 tape has 52 wraps each within 4 bands, requiring 208 passes to read completely.

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

#180
post #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.

I inherently want to know how this works but I suck at physics and I’m just going to simply also stare in aw from the outside.
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