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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

#231

Post by ddingus »

fernly wrote: 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.

Absolutely. I had no idea tape was being pushed to these levels!

Crazy good tech accomplishment right there.

In a way, I am somehow comforted. Tape remaining relevant kind of dropped off my radar. Good to see.

317Gb / square inch AND 15km/h transport speed? That is nuts fast.

Wonder how robust it really is? Of course at those densities and potential transfer rates there is ample room for error recovery.

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

#232

Post by adrianN »

elcritch wrote: post #218
sedatk wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 slipper…

I was thinking that DNA is a pretty robust storage medium. Perhaps we could use it in coming years to store data for long term survival. Though considering these comments and the advent of mRNA/CRISPR, perhaps we could store data for future generations in our own DNA. That'd be fascinating if you could read journals or even audio/video of your ancestors from your biological inheritance from them. What if we could eng…

Just store your diaries in a line of yeast that produces tasty beer or wine. That could work. I wonder what the oldest yeast lines in use today are, and how stable their genomes are.

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

#233

Post by ddingus »

Synaesthesia wrote: post #224
samstave wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Let me just surveillance out for a second" Guess where this will have the biggest impact in the next decade - the long term storage of billions of personally invading surveillance data points forever... Seriously, this tech will be abused. Against everyone. Facial recognition much? Zoom data? TikTok Data in a very compact physical form-factor? Utah and China will LOVE this!

Data storage is already so cheap thanks to HDDs that a poor African country can afford to spy on its population. This will hardly change anything. If we want to do something about it we have to revolt in the streets.

The tape may well be the better scenario.

With a pile of random access devices, the time and cost of a single record retrieve is low, though the cost of bulk records can get high.

All the oppressors need is a half decade window, maybe a decade to be pretty much golden, as far as totalitarianism goes.

The tape will definitely hold the data, and then some apparently.

But access costs go up.

The drives seem to encourage indiscriminate targeting.

Tapes would at least favor some priority.

The smarter bears will use both!

You are not wrong about what it will take.

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

#234

Post by jtxx »

Blikkentrekker wrote: post #176
jtxx wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I guess it’s just me then. I wouldn’t write “we” in a comment online without explaining who “we” is, it seems like an unnecessary detail to explain

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

#235

Post by nine_k »

jeffbee wrote: post #186
ajnin wrote: post #152

Earlier 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.

That is too high but tape really does have surprisingly high transfer rates. You need a real computer to keep them streaming.

Wow, it's like a segment of a floppy disk of infinite radius!

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

#236

Post by nine_k »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #199
texse wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Positioning the tape should become harder, I suppose.

Also, I suppose they limit the read bandwidth with something like what a single Infiniband connection would support; few disk arrays support much higher speeds.

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

#237

Post by seg_lol »

Karunamon wrote: post #217
gruez wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. That's still... pretty terrible. If we compare you costs for a tape drive against a 14TB easystore @ $190[1], the break-even point is around 72TB. I don't know abou…

It's not a fair comparison to put up hard drives (integrated mechanics) against tape drives (seprated mechanics). They do not solve the same problem and have different longevity profiles. If I'm spending $500 on tape storage, it's because I want something that will last a long time, something that portable hard drives tend to have issues with. LTO5 onward supports LTFS, which exposes the tape to the OS as if it were…

LTFS is ok, a multilevel tar file with a file list followed by an FEC encoded block store would be easier and more portable.

It has been 8+ years since I played with LTFS, so maybe it has improved.

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

#238

Post by cm2187 »

Max_aaa wrote: post #159
cm2187 wrote: post #155

Earlier 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.

Not really. You can buy a 18TB hard drive now. Even if your data is humongous and needs several of those, it will likely fit on a single drive in 5-10y. So it takes an increasingly smaller amount of time to replicate (excluding the copying time which keeps the machine busy but not you).

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

#239

Post by nine_k »

gruez wrote: post #209
bronco21016 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

>Otherwise that sounds like a nightmare that would require an insanely high paycheck. If the courier in question is 6'2" that might be the case, but I suspect if the person was much smaller and is a heavy sleeper, that it wouldn't be too bad.

It's an ideal job if all you need is hours of concentration, reading, and writing or drawing. A writer, a PhD student with a laptop, a comic book author, etc.

Or, maybe, even a Zen monk who spends time meditating.

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

#240

Post by dannyw »

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…

Ask HN: How can I create the most reliable and durable NAS today? I have a lot of very sentimental, very-important files, such as family photos and videos. And I simply like to hoard data.

I currently have 8TB of data stored on a Synology DS218+ with RAID1, and monthly data scrubs (verifying checksums). It is backed up remotely to Google Drive (in encrypted form), and I also maintain an infrequently-updated, once-per-quarter disk clone with an external HDD.

My biggest concern with my current setup is that the memory is non-ECC. Even though the files are checksummed, I am concerned that specific memory corruption / bit-flips could propagnate into the checksums, and hence result in data corruption.

I am considering:

* Building my own FreeNAS box using AMD Ryzen (which semi-officially support ECC memory). My concerns here are the semi-official nature of support: how do I know if ECC works, before a rare cosmic bit-flip?

* Purchasing a Synology DS1621+. This is AUD$1400 which is a tough pill to swallow, for the equivalent of a first-gen Ryzen quad core and 4GB of memory.

Any options or recommendations is appreciated!!

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