Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

New 5D Storage to Offer 10,000x the Density of Blu-ray

tomshardware.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 137 posts

Re: New 5D Storage to Offer 10,000x the Density of Blu-ray

#101

Post by zitterbewegung »

jl6 wrote: post #11
zitterbewegung wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are tape drives fragile? I use them for my long term backups of personal files I thought they were robust ?

What scale are you working at and how have you made it cost-effective versus a stack of external HDDs?

My brother got a cheap LTO tape drive on eBay and he bought a few LTO tapes so I think I bought one off of him for a few dollars more.

It’s only a few hundred gigabytes and the tape holds about one terabytes .

Note this is my long term cold storage I have backups made on my MacBook Air (hard disk) and my sold MacBook Pro (ssd which I will use on my new 2021 MacBook Pro eventually).

I also have backups using blu ray discs and I have one long term storage blu ray that I have been meaning to use

Re: New 5D Storage to Offer 10,000x the Density of Blu-ray

#102

Post by zitterbewegung »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #42
zitterbewegung wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are tape drives fragile? I use them for my long term backups of personal files I thought they were robust ?

Optical discs aren't torn apart when the reader malfunctions?

Optical disks degrade due to bit rot when the substrate of the disc starts to peel off

Re: New 5D Storage to Offer 10,000x the Density of Blu-ray

#103

Post by manquer »

jcadam wrote: post #92
MayeulC wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some have theorized that this is what's behind Amazon Glacier, and that they want to keep it to themselves: https://storagemojo.com/2014/04/25/amazons-glacier-secret-bd... I also crave for such cheap storage, perfect for archival/backups, especially when combined with modern snapshotting. HVDs never really materialized, despite being promising, and actually on the market at some point, IIRC: https://en.wikipedia.org/…

I'd take an on-prem solution for cheap archival storage any day over Glacier.

With egress costs on s3 that may not be viable if you generate data on the cloud

Re: New 5D Storage to Offer 10,000x the Density of Blu-ray

#104

Post by ChuckMcM »

Pretty neat, this is worrisome (from the paper): A book was recorded in 4-bit voxels with nearly 100% readout accuracy.

Kind of like "this new car hardly kills anyone." :-) Given that data recovery is like the most significant aspect of any data archival solution.

Not a mention of readout speed either, there are many read-only datasets that could benefit from something like this of course, but if it is way slower than LTO tape I'm not sure exactly where it fits in.

Re: New 5D Storage to Offer 10,000x the Density of Blu-ray

#105

Post by mvanaltvorst »

arcticbull wrote: post #100
MAGZine wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Dimension in the data sense of the word, not Dimension in the spatial sense of the word. Multi-dimension data is a thing, and it goes a lot higher than 4, 5, or 7.

Isn't this normally referred to as "degrees of freedom" rather than dimensions?

Statisticians and mathematicians call them dimensions, machine learning engineers call them "features". Statisticians and mathematicians usually interpret observations as vectors in n-dimensional space, which leads to some interesting geometric results. Hence the term dimension, we do mathematics with them as if they were actual points in some high-dimensional space. Degrees of freedom are something a bit more nuanced that are of use when you start to do specific statistical tests, and they do not have to be exactly equal to your amount of dimensions.

Re: New 5D Storage to Offer 10,000x the Density of Blu-ray

#106

Post by kmeisthax »

memco wrote: post #87
kmeisthax wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that much of the demand for cheap, shelf-stable backup media has gone away over the last decade or two. Most backup jobs either go to cloud or to disk, not tape. And because of that, tape drives are more expensive than ever, which takes away much of the benefit of the cheap media. LTO, for example, is relegated to archival use-cases nowadays, such as video production. You'd think that would make sense,…

To add: LTO speeds are currently in the 300MB/s range: if you want > TB size storage you likely don't want ~100MB/s for regular use. I work on systems where we are regularly writing multiple tapes of 5+ TB and if you get only 100MB/s you're waiting hours and if something fails or gets stuck you can be thrown off schedule by more than a day very quickly. Even at the current 300MB/s speeds it's very slow. If personal a…

Not to mention that 300MB/s is considered best-case conditions for sequentially stored data. Anything even remotely random is going to have far slower archival times, unless you have archival software that does parallel I/O. (In my experience, not many archivers do this.)

Most production tape installations include dedicated disk storage to act as a buffer for the drives. You archive to disk first, so that your drives aren't tied up, and then write the now-sequential data to tape.

Re: New 5D Storage to Offer 10,000x the Density of Blu-ray

#107

Post by ClumsyPilot »

chmod775 wrote: post #51
chriswarbo wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slight nit-pick, but any number of dimensions can be reduced to one, using a pairing function https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pairing_function or a space-filling curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-filling_curve

Right. I don't immediately see how either of those would work for uncountable infinite sets, but it may be possible. Clearly some other limitations are required to make "dimensions" a useful metric in this context.

I think once you are talking about "uncountable infinite sets" and different kinds of infinities, the definition has become very niche.

Re: New 5D Storage to Offer 10,000x the Density of Blu-ray

#108

Post by babypuncher »

Rygian wrote: post #91
MAGZine wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Dimension in the data sense of the word, not Dimension in the spatial sense of the word. Multi-dimension data is a thing, and it goes a lot higher than 4, 5, or 7.

Which reduces to one single dimension anyway, on a storage medium: my bytes are stored from offset 0 to offset N.

Yes, the dimensions are an abstraction to make it easier for our human brains to organize certain collections of data. I don't think it makes them any less valid, otherwise we would refer to every data type as an array of bits and nothing more.

Re: New 5D Storage to Offer 10,000x the Density of Blu-ray

#109

Post by guerrilla »

gjm11 wrote: post #10

In case anyone is wondering what they mean by "5D": they mean it's a 3D array of marks, each of which has both size and orientation. The 3D array is three 2D layers. According to this definition, a DVD or Blu-Ray disc is "4D" because it can have multiple layers each of which stores 1-dimensional data (pit versus no pit). And a book is at least "7D" because it contains a 3D arrangement of marks, and marks can vary in…

> But there's no need for this "five-dimensional" bullshit.

Sure there is. It's going to sell great with idiots. I still remember morons super hyped about Opteron trying to claim it was an optical CPU.

Post reply on HN