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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

#111

Post by webmobdev »

stratosgear wrote: post #31
jjulius wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$100 is definitely not "basically zero". Not only that, but a $5k tape drive and tapes are designed to last a significantly longer period of time, essentially bringing the cost of long-term storage closer to $0/year than your option of spending $100/year.

5k amortized at 100/year is 50 years to get your money's worth. It seems 100/year is a much better deal. I don't see your math working out...

That's assuming a consumer tape drive will cost that much. They'll succeed only if they cost less than $500. Enterprisey stuffs are always costly. Just like consumer grade HDDs vs entrprise HDDs.

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

#112

Post by monocasa »

dragontamer wrote: post #106
monocasa wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

16x bluray is 72MB/s (576Mb/s).

Hard Drives are going 220MB/s and people still think they're too slow. I just gave a look at the first Blu Ray media on Newegg.com. Here's what is search #1: https://www.newegg.com/verbatim-6x-25gb-bd-r/p/N82E168171301... That's 6x speed, or roughly 25MB/s. You can store 25GBs per disk and it is going to take 1000% longer than a $150 5TB Hard Drive AND you're going to have to sit there and remove / add a new disk eve…

Hard drives have a bad habit of not turning on after being off for a year or two is why.

And yeah, you'd be buying 16x 128GB media in this use case. Not the bottom of the barrel stuff for giving home movies to grandma.

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

#113

Post by tomcam »

chrisseaton wrote: post #27
jjulius wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP explicitly mentioned HDDs in their post; they do not want to be transferring data to a new HDD every year, or two years, or five years.

Well that's why I asked what I'm missing! It's just one command to copy from an old HD to the new HD? Takes me all of 30 mins once a year.

Not trying to be rude or sarcastic here: what is that command? Certainly in my experience on both macOS and windows, the default operating system GUI mass copy invariably poops out halfway through, with no explanation as to why. Maybe something like this?

    rsync --archive --acls --xattrs  --checksum --vvv /src /dest

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

#114

Post by sp332 »

pochamago wrote: post #103
SoSoRoCoCo wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally! I have a friend who does sound engineering for hollywood and he has two firesafes full of HDDs, SSDs and TAPE with hundreds and hundreds of terabytes of data. I couldn't even finish the sentence "Have you tried the cl..." before he cut me off and was like: way too much data. Didnt have the heart to tell him two of those three media types need to be powered on periodically...

HDDs can't require powering all that periodically. I just found my hard drive from college, and plugging it into my computer just worked. Great finding all my old documents and music that I'd forgotten about.

The lubricants might settle, causing sticking of various components when you try to power it on after a long time.

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

#115

Post by dragontamer »

monocasa wrote: post #112
dragontamer wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard Drives are going 220MB/s and people still think they're too slow. I just gave a look at the first Blu Ray media on Newegg.com. Here's what is search #1: https://www.newegg.com/verbatim-6x-25gb-bd-r/p/N82E168171301... That's 6x speed, or roughly 25MB/s. You can store 25GBs per disk and it is going to take 1000% longer than a $150 5TB Hard Drive AND you're going to have to sit there and remove / add a new disk eve…

Hard drives have a bad habit of not turning on after being off for a year or two is why. And yeah, you'd be buying 16x 128GB media in this use case. Not the bottom of the barrel stuff for giving home movies to grandma.

> Hard drives have a bad habit of not turning on after being off for a year or two is why.

So push the "ZFS Scrub" button every 6 months.

Don't store hard drives. Store a NAS. The entire freaking computer is stored as a unit. Every few months, turn it on, push "ZFS Scrub" to double-check the data, and you're set.

BluRays also degenerate over time unless stored in proper UV-sealed conditions / temperature controlled conditions. Everything requires a degree of maintenance and checking. The question is how to best automate that checking process.

Hard drives are read/written to at 200+ MB/s, making these maintenance checks much faster. They're also bigger, which means no need to manually insert / remove disks from drives. This entire process could be automated from a "Wake on LAN" packet and a few clicks from any terminal (phone, computer, whatever).

-------

I dunno. I'm looking up these BD-R XL drives you're talking about: its like $30 per 100GB disk or something. That's an obscene price for so little storage. I guess if all your data fits in one of those disks its fine, but... I got some archived movies and stuff on my NAS (50GB per Blu Ray). Needed to store some of my video editing files (so I need the original data that matches with my video editing files).

The real data of importance of mine probably fits in a BluRay. But then I won't have all the other stuff I've saved up "because I can" on my 2x 5TB NAS (Mirrored, so only 5TB of storage).

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

#116

Post by blackrock »

klodolph wrote: post #104
ardy42 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The prices are much cheaper now. You can get a single tape drive for under $300 and enterprise grade single tape drives for under $3k. Those tapes only hold 200 GB, and you can get a 10 TB hard drive today for less than $300: https://www.newegg.com/red-wd101efax-10tb/p/N82E16822234407 While tapes are theoretically cool, the the drives are just too rare for them to be of any practical value to a home user. Even if t…

> 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…

True, on hard drives, the controller board will eventually fail. The solders might decompose or the circuitry might fail. Then you’re left with a platter full of randomized bits.

But on tape, the controller mechanism is separated from the storage medium. The controller mechanism is inside the drive readers itself, which will eventually fail.

So for both, it’s a trade off. They’re both going to eventually fail.

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

#117

Post by ikiris »

ashton314 wrote: post #83

I remember watching the pilot episode of Star Trek (the original series) and chuckling when Spock reports that “the tapes are badly damaged” from the capsule they recovered near the barrier at the edge of the galaxy. Turns out it might not be that outdated after all.

In fairness, you can open any box of tapes and assume the media will be badly damaged XD

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

#118

Post by ardy42 »

klodolph wrote: post #104
ardy42 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The prices are much cheaper now. You can get a single tape drive for under $300 and enterprise grade single tape drives for under $3k. Those tapes only hold 200 GB, and you can get a 10 TB hard drive today for less than $300: https://www.newegg.com/red-wd101efax-10tb/p/N82E16822234407 While tapes are theoretically cool, the the drives are just too rare for them to be of any practical value to a home user. Even if t…

> 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 any comments about whether tape drives are suitable for home use are really comments about whether you are interested in the use case of people who need to store >120 TB at home.

> If you are running a YouTube channel as a hobby, or you run a side business doing videography for weddings, the tape drive starts to sound a lot better. The 120 TB cutoff might be around 300 hours of video, which might be only 50 events.

No dispute there, but I think most >120 TB home use cases run into the question of if it's even worth it to keep the data (raw/uncompressed). For most people, the answer is probably no, and curation/compression makes far more sense. For instance, I don't think it's even typical for wedding photographers/videographers to store their final product indefinitely, let alone the raw footage for a re-edit. You can keep a lot more events in a lot less space if you're only keep the raw footage for a few recent events and the 15-30 minute final edit for a year after it's finalized.

> And let’s not forget that if you have 120TB of hard drives, you’re in the regime where you start having to buy multiple machines.

Not if you swap disks as offline storage.

> As for longetivity—I don’t have the data handy. If you are storing data on tape, you need to migrate to newer generations of tape, as old generations become obsolete and unavailable. If you are storing on hard disks, you also need to migrate because hard disks eventually fail (even if they are not powered on).

Honestly, the theoretical longevity is the only aspect of tape that appeals to me, but like you said enterprise tapes will end up being like these enterprise optical disks in a fairly short period of time, so you're regularly going to have migration legwork to do or your data's effectively toast.

https://twitter.com/foone/status/1236524992709316608

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

#120

Post by monocasa »

dragontamer wrote: post #115
monocasa wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard drives have a bad habit of not turning on after being off for a year or two is why. And yeah, you'd be buying 16x 128GB media in this use case. Not the bottom of the barrel stuff for giving home movies to grandma.

> Hard drives have a bad habit of not turning on after being off for a year or two is why. So push the "ZFS Scrub" button every 6 months. Don't store hard drives. Store a NAS. The entire freaking computer is stored as a unit. Every few months, turn it on, push "ZFS Scrub" to double-check the data, and you're set. BluRays also degenerate over time unless stored in proper UV-sealed conditions / temperature controlled c…

That violates the 3-2-1 backup rule.

3 copies, 2 different media, 1 offsite.

I've seen large orgs do what you're saying and lose nearly everything because one bug took them out completely.

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