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The lto10 info and stats are wrong? It's 30TB / 75Tb compressed. Read write many, and can hit speeds of 1GB/s ? I didn't read any info on the write and then read speeds of this holotape.
LTO-10 is its future replacement.
1) What on earth do they mean by "zero energy storage"? Magnetic tape doesn't consume energy at idle either. Hell, even hard disks can be powered down. 2) "Also, the optical-based new tech’s touted 50-year life is 10x the life of magnetic tape." Say what? Most magnetic tape is rated for up to 30 years in storage. You might only get a few years out of a tape if you're writing to it frequently... but this new format is…
> What on earth do they mean by "zero energy storage"? My guess is that someone from marketing came up with that bullet point, and the company's actual engineers are torn between eye-rolling and wanting to get very violent on the marketing person.
I wish we had something better than "walk through multiple hard drives as a data nomad and remember to use them every now and then" as a cost-effective and consumer oriented method for cold storage. I don't even care for the speed. Tape is obnoxious with high up front investments, not even targeting private use, Blu-ray never really became a surefire way and there were too much uncertainty and variety depending on br…
Or to put it another way, the association of backing up with moral virtue doesn't pass ordinary people's subconscious bullshit detector.
I wish we had something better than "walk through multiple hard drives as a data nomad and remember to use them every now and then" as a cost-effective and consumer oriented method for cold storage. I don't even care for the speed. Tape is obnoxious with high up front investments, not even targeting private use, Blu-ray never really became a surefire way and there were too much uncertainty and variety depending on br…
You can buy used older gen LTO drives for not too much money.
And already you have to be really committed to backing up to go down that rabbit hole. LTO is lots of different standards that evolved over many years.
Just for clarity, I am not suggesting that the holographic tape in TFA is better.
The trouble with holograms, if I understand them correctly, is that when storing information in a phase structure, to change one small part of the information you are storing, the hologram must be adjusted everywhere. The bits are encoded in a way that’s a bit nonlocal. I think a reasonable analogy is how small changes to a structure affect its Fourier transform. The whole thing leaps in Fourier space for a little wi…
I assume that this is write-once memory. When cheap enough, write-once memories are much preferable over read-write memories, for archival and backup purposes. Magnetic tapes are also normally used as append-only memories and very infrequently, if ever, they may be completely erased in order to reuse the cartridge and avoid buying a replacement. While it is possible to use a magnetic tape like you would use a HDD, er…
I'd be happy to be proven wrong though.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can buy used older gen LTO drives for not too much money.
Sure, but how easy will it be to run those drives in 10 years? Mechanical issues, driver issues, etc. And already you have to be really committed to backing up to go down that rabbit hole. LTO is lots of different standards that evolved over many years. Just for clarity, I am not suggesting that the holographic tape in TFA is better.
Exactly as easy as it is now? LTO drives are used in the millions globally to back up many exabytes of data. LTO is designed with backwards compatibility. a drive on gen n can read tapes from gen n-1 and n-2 and write to tapes from gen-1.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, but how easy will it be to run those drives in 10 years? Mechanical issues, driver issues, etc. And already you have to be really committed to backing up to go down that rabbit hole. LTO is lots of different standards that evolved over many years. Just for clarity, I am not suggesting that the holographic tape in TFA is better.
"but how easy will it be to run those drives in 10 years?" Exactly as easy as it is now? LTO drives are used in the millions globally to back up many exabytes of data. LTO is designed with backwards compatibility. a drive on gen n can read tapes from gen n-1 and n-2 and write to tapes from gen-1.
One could hope. But hope is not a plan and generally complex electronics become increasingly harder to run with obsolescence. And LTO has planned obsolesence (probably because the expectation is that most companies will run drives into the ground with the expectation of upgrading to larger capacities on the roadmap).
Also LTO drives put out noise appropriate for a data center, not bedroom. While this is probably ok if you are into home servers, that’s not for casual use.
Or to put it another way, LTO is a how-hard-could-it-be solution which is fine if you need a new hobby or are making money but not a greenfield solution for most people.
Don’t get me wrong, I have been attracted by the idea of being the kind of person who can say they use LTO at home for some years. But every time I look at it, I don’t want LTO as a hobby any more than I want a eight Pentium Pro Proliant Server as a hobby.