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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

#301

Post by dsego »

est31 wrote: post #66
monocasa wrote: post #60

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 days the main benefit to tape is the physical safety of having the media be inside a cartridge, and the streaming read speeds are stupid fast so you can reconstruct a backup faster. Home use, even with a data hoarder sized NAS, is better served with a bluray burner with multiple copies.

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

There might be a benefit to it. If 1 disc corrupts you only loose 50GB. If your hard drive fails, you loose all 5TB at once.

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

#302

Post by jl6 »

iso947 wrote: post #268
jl6 wrote: post #264

Current LTO-9 tapes can store 18TB and the LTO roadmap doubles capacity about every 3 years. So this tape tech would be on the same scale as we might expect LTO-14 to offer in 2035. So unless this is an incredibly radical breakthrough, that’s the timeframe I’d expect for the headline to become a real product. Note that the article shows a table from IBM claiming they achieved 35TB-per-cartridge capacity in 2010, and…

Why do LTO manufacturers always quote compressed sizes, like we’re in the days of stacker?

IMHO, partly for marketing bluster, but partly because hardware compression in the tape drive is a useful feature if you don’t want to handle 1000MB/sec of compression workload on the host during backups.

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

#303

Post by bluepoint »

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.

That is roughly 500 bits per square micrometer or 2000 square nanometers per bit or an average (assuming square lattice) distance of 50 nanometers per bit.

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

#304

Post by ACAVJW4H »

jabl wrote: post #286
Dylan16807 wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LTO-9 should be hitting the market very soon and supports up to 45TB per tape (compressed capacity, 18TB raw). LTO is cool and all but is the "compressed capacity" number really something to repeat with a straight face? The tape holds 18TB, we don't need to pretend it's anything else. > But certainly tape has continued to progress much faster than most people would have imagined. Mostly it has. But I'm somewhat wor…

> LTO is cool and all but is the "compressed capacity" number really something to repeat with a straight face? No, but it's been the standard in the tape industry for decades. Probably dates back to the first tape controllers that had builtin compression (so compression didn't tax the main cpu).

I am trying to find something what would be make compression done by the tape controller favorable. Maybe it somehow makes the recovery more fault tolerant in the long run? Because it knows about the intricacies of the medium. Just guessing, I know nothing about tape storage

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

#306

Post by ddingus »

cm2187 wrote: post #299
ddingus wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In a world where we hold people accountable for stupid things they did or said when they were teenagers, I can see a lot of blackmail value in retaining data for a much longer period of time.

It is all bad, agreed. Was just musing over kinds of evil more than anything else.

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

#307

Post by ddingus »

ACAVJW4H wrote: post #304
jabl wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LTO is cool and all but is the "compressed capacity" number really something to repeat with a straight face? No, but it's been the standard in the tape industry for decades. Probably dates back to the first tape controllers that had builtin compression (so compression didn't tax the main cpu).

I am trying to find something what would be make compression done by the tape controller favorable. Maybe it somehow makes the recovery more fault tolerant in the long run? Because it knows about the intricacies of the medium. Just guessing, I know nothing about tape storage

My first LTO drive installation was on a multi user SGI CAD application server. This system did all the compute and data management for roughly 30 users. I/O streaming was easy and efficient.

IRIX allowed for live file system backups and the drive doing compression meant all that happening with negligible user performance impact.

Was literally set it and forget it, aside from tape rotation into off site storage.

Compression would have had an impact.

We don't do multi user app serving much today, so maybe a smart drive has less benefit. But it mattered then. 2000's era.

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

#308

Post by labawi »

sedatk wrote: post #177
nichch wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

> The objective of this study was to investigate the behavior of the GlassMasterDisc of Syylex under extreme climatic conditions (90°C and 85% relative humidity) and to demonstrate the potential of this technology for digital archiving.

> The result of this study is that the GlassMasterDisc has a much longer lifetime in accelerated aging than other available DVD±R

I wouldn't draw any other conclusions on normal ageing of other tested media. They did an accelerated aging test at 90°C and 85% RH, where most discs didn't last a single test cycle (of 10 days), two discs lasted a single cycle, and only syylex lasted all 4 cycles.

Quote on a brand-name DVD

> This DVD model had the longest lifetime (i.e. 1500h) at 80°C and 85% RH. At 90°C, it is destroyed after the first cycle of 250 hours.

For an idea of what it does to the substrate:

> [for measurement] DVDs have to be taken [out] .. To prevent the formation of water droplets in the polycarbonate, it is necessary to "purify" the polycarbonate from the water that was absorbed at high temperature.

OTOH, I had CDs (Verbatim, upper middle class), of which about 1-2 of 50 had issues after 20 years storage (in dark, mostly room-temperature conditions).

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

#309

Post by bastawhiz »

sedatk wrote: post #191
bastawhiz wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 slipper…

The importance of those slippers is tied strongly to their rarity. So little survived from 5000 years ago that almost anything from that time is valuable.

By comparison, we'll create more data in the next ten minutes than entire centuries from our relatively recent history. Lots of stuff is getting preserved in lots of places with substantive redundancy for virtually nothing. Your slippers today are likely to be more valuable than the near-infinite troves of documents and photos and whatever else.

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

#310

Post by guenthert »

paulmd wrote: post #277
ddingus wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It has never really entered the public consciousness since it's not a consumer-facing technology but tape development has continued apace. LTO-9 should be hitting the market very soon and supports up to 45TB per tape (compressed capacity, 18TB raw). Not quite sure where IBM's numbers here come from, their previous numbers don't match up to the progression of the LTO tape series' capacity. Maybe they are citing "resea…

The announcement [1] is of lab results, so yes "research numbers". A commercial product might be years out (if ever developed). This is not meant to belittle the achievement (which is awesome), but to clarify what has been done and what to expect.

[1] https://www.fujifilm.com/news/n201216_01.html

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