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Honest question: are tape drives fast enough for use in any asynchronous/random-access environment, or are they generally limited to backups, financial and scientific data? For example, could something like Youtube rely on tapes as the tail end of a LRU cache or similar?
Honest question: are tape drives fast enough for use in any asynchronous/random-access environment, or are they generally limited to backups, financial and scientific data? For example, could something like Youtube rely on tapes as the tail end of a LRU cache or similar?
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open#Positioning_t... , in the region of 50 seconds, which isn't really good enough.
Honest question: are tape drives fast enough for use in any asynchronous/random-access environment, or are they generally limited to backups, financial and scientific data? For example, could something like Youtube rely on tapes as the tail end of a LRU cache or similar?
But, if Youtube archived the original upload on tape before transcoding to a different format, then it would be useful. The tapes would really only be "read," in a batch manner, when they want to re-transcode to a newer codec.
Likewise, tape would be a great way to store the digital equivalent of the "negatives" once a movie, TV show, or music album is complete. No one needs instant, on-demand, random access to every shot, every take, and every camera angle. It can be pulled off the tape in 10 years when producing the Nth remaster for the new super-duper bluray version.
Note that commercial tape cartridges max out at 15TB - so, less than the theoretical amount enabled by the 2010 breakthrough. Will be a long time and quite expensive when/if these finally hit the market. I would love to store backups on tape at home. Unfortunately harddrives are still the cheapest option in practice, and they are a bit too expensive and a bit impractical to comfortably use as offline storage (and tra…
recently pricing out 337gb SSD drives for our production and backup servers ends up with a price about nine times that of which it would cost per terabyte of a new iMac. When you get into have 60 to 120TB it adds up but reliability is so much more important.
Now I have never looked at tape backup for home use, what is the throughput of most of these? Is this merely a limit of the interface?
Honest question: are tape drives fast enough for use in any asynchronous/random-access environment, or are they generally limited to backups, financial and scientific data? For example, could something like Youtube rely on tapes as the tail end of a LRU cache or similar?
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. --Tanenbaum
An average truck can house anywhere between 20,000L to 40,000L [1]. Let's take an average 30,000L.
An average truck can also travel at anywhere in between 56 kph to 137 kph [2]. Let's take an average 100 kph.
The tape catridge in the image looks like it's about 4mm x 10cm x 6 cm. And it can store 330 TB.
Let's say we're transfering from New York to San Francisco. That's 4,678 km according to Google.
Total data transferred in one truck = 330 TB * ((30000 L / (1000 L / m^3)) / ((4 mm * 0.001 m/mm) * (10 cm * 0.01 cm/m) * (6 cm * 0.01 cm/m)) = 412500000 TB
Total time taken = (4678 km * (1000 m/km)) / (100 kph * (0.27 (m/s)/kph)) = 173259 s
Bandwidth = 412500000 TB / 173259 s = 2380 TB/sec = 19046 Tbps
For reference, 255 Tbps was the fastest single fibre [3]. This is a good 75 times faster.
Of course, all this comes with a network latency of 2 days.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_truck#Size_and_volume [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limits_in_the_United_Sta... [3] https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/192929-255tbps-worlds-fa...
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. --Tanenbaum
Let's do some XKCD what-if math because I love doing stuff like this. An average truck can house anywhere between 20,000L to 40,000L [1]. Let's take an average 30,000L. An average truck can also travel at anywhere in between 56 kph to 137 kph [2]. Let's take an average 100 kph. The tape catridge in the image looks like it's about 4mm x 10cm x 6 cm. And it can store 330 TB. Let's say we're transfering from New York to…
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. --Tanenbaum
Let's do some XKCD what-if math because I love doing stuff like this. An average truck can house anywhere between 20,000L to 40,000L [1]. Let's take an average 30,000L. An average truck can also travel at anywhere in between 56 kph to 137 kph [2]. Let's take an average 100 kph. The tape catridge in the image looks like it's about 4mm x 10cm x 6 cm. And it can store 330 TB. Let's say we're transfering from New York to…