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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

#191

Post by sedatk »

bastawhiz wrote: post #182
eulers_secret wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If nobody is "inheriting" your data (or rather—nobody cares enough to keep your data around), it seems kind of moot to ensure it hangs around. That is, if I put stuff in an S3 bucket and pre-pay for 100 years, if nobody is around to download it in 100 years then why bother? If you wanted to make a sort of digital time capsule and didn't care who discovered it, your next best bet would probably be the Internet Archive…

I absolutely take inheritance into account when having backups lasting for a hundred years, but regardless of how uninteresting my data looks, we don't know if today's boring data would be invaluable for science in the future. We show slippers from 5000 years ago in museums today and they're invaluable. Consider the person who owned it, walking on a national treasure, unaware. Maybe, they didn't even like the slippers, found them boring. :)

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

#192

Post by sedatk »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #167
sedatk wrote: 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…

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...

You're right. That reminded me that I really don't know the state of my cold backups.

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

#193

Post by raihansaputra »

diveanon wrote: post #189
analog31 wrote: post #142

Time 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

When I was working in vfx we employed a guy who's sole job was to fly back and forth from LA to Melbourne with pelican cases full of hard drives. It was faster and more secure since we were working on air gapped networks.

That feels like a dream job for a temporary amount of time. And very effective too. I assume the VFX studio is in Melbourne?

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

#194

Post by phonon »

sedatk wrote: 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…

Use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parchive and add as much redundancy as you like. A lot cheaper to over-provision, than to create the uber-archive medium.

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

#195

Post by bronco21016 »

raihansaputra wrote: post #193
diveanon wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was working in vfx we employed a guy who's sole job was to fly back and forth from LA to Melbourne with pelican cases full of hard drives. It was faster and more secure since we were working on air gapped networks.

That feels like a dream job for a temporary amount of time. And very effective too. I assume the VFX studio is in Melbourne?

Maybe if they’re flying first class? Otherwise that sounds like a nightmare that would require an insanely high paycheck.

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

#196

Post by Karunamon »

ardy42 wrote: post #118
klodolph wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

> 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. But it looks like the cheapest drive on Newegg for that is $3,299.00: https://www.newegg.com/p/2BM-0046-00001 > In other words, if you have more than about 120 TB of data, then it is cheaper to buy a tape drive. I think a…

You don't even need the absolute latest drives to get reasonable storage volumes. Some careful shopping can net you an LTO-5 (1.5TB native capacity) library unit (one that can be upgraded to newer generations) for under $500, with new tapes $10-15 each.

The nice thing about LTO as a format is its relative predictability and ease of acquiring the parts, even the very obsolete ones. It's all SCSI or SAS, most of the interesting stuff happens at the hardware level, with a bog-standard API. Your average backup app, whether it be Backup Exec or mtx/tar/etc. on Linux doesn't need to care about the media format. Unlike actual "enterprise" shops with datacenters and support contracts and such cruft, where the primary concern is "does it work", it is fine to buy older units second-hand. They are plentiful and cheap.

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

#197

Post by harikb »

diveanon wrote: post #189
analog31 wrote: post #142

Time 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

When I was working in vfx we employed a guy who's sole job was to fly back and forth from LA to Melbourne with pelican cases full of hard drives. It was faster and more secure since we were working on air gapped networks.

Hopefully this was cabin baggage and not something left unattended for minutes on the baggage belt

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

#198

Post by Karunamon »

webmobdev wrote: post #80
est31 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Storing even 5 TB of data onto bluray disks requires 100 disks of 50 GB dual layer capacity. That's a lot of disks.

Yeah. And that too if you are willing to ignore the really slow speed to write them all!

If you're doing archival storage, does the write speed really matter? If you have enough volume of incoming data where the write speed does matter, you've already eliminated most archival storage methods anyways.

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

#199

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

texse wrote: post #179
LeifCarrotson wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Why not just have multiple heads then?

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

#200

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

sedatk wrote: 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…

> M-DISC didn't hold up

Since I have a lot of stuff on M-DISC, you’ve now got me worried. Link? Any other info? I don’t need 1000 years but what is the lifespan?

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