"Areal" density (bits per unit area), not "Aerial" density (bits in the atmosphere?)
IBM and Sony cram up to 330TB into tiny tape cartridge
31–40 of 49 posts
Re: IBM and Sony cram up to 330TB into tiny tape cartridge
#32Backing up a few PB of data is costly and bulky, since you really must use hard disks. I've been waiting for this tech for years.
Re: IBM and Sony cram up to 330TB into tiny tape cartridge
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
well the drives/etc we have for home use are magnitudes cheaper than commercial gear which only really has equivalence with regards to how much it stores. 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…
People who are really serious about storage like Google and Backblaze tend to buy those cheap commercial hard drives instead of the expensive enterprise drives. Tape drives for home use don't make much sense sadly. The tapes are too expensive compared to hard drives. It's easier to buy one of those SATA docks if you want to have cold backups. https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E1681715...
> The tapes are too expensive compared to hard drives.
That's not at all my experience, at least when it comes to LTO. Sure, TS and T10k are expensive, but they're the 'enterprise solutions'. Modern LTO tapes can be bought for ~$100 if you shop around. Less if you buy in bulk.
Re: IBM and Sony cram up to 330TB into tiny tape cartridge
#34Can anyone speculate about the price for one unit?
Hard to say. That type of capacity isn't even on the LTO road map yet, and IBM is one of the controlling companies there. LTO-7 currently holds about 6TB uncompressed, and they're about $100 per cartridge. LTO-8 will double the storage, and will probably be available by the end of next year. I'd guess the cartridges will be more expensive initially, but it's hard to say what the premium will be.
> will probably be available by the end of next year.
I'd be surprised if it took that long.
Re: IBM and Sony cram up to 330TB into tiny tape cartridge
#35I would love a low cost tape backup solution for home use. I would put things on it that I normally would delete (but may theoretically need at a later stage). This could range anything from written material (small size) to raw 4k video material that normally would require fairly expensive storage. What tape solutions like these are available right now at a decent cost? Thinking sizes up to 50TB, so conventional disk…
Define "low cost".
You won't get away with spending less than $1,500 or so on a recent generation tape drive. Don't forget you need a SCSI card. This is the point at which most enthusiasts just turn around, walk home, and order a big stack of hard disks. Sure, you get to save a bunch of money on media. An LTO-6 cartridge costs $25, and that's 2.5TB. But tape is a pain in the ass, and since it has separate capex for throughput and capacity, you need to do the calculations for both. Then you only have one drive, so if it breaks you are sitting without it for X weeks until repairs go through. You could save money by buying older generations like LTO-5 (now two generations old), maybe $500 for a used drive on eBay and now you have to buy almost twice as many tapes which is a pain.
By comparison, with HDD you can pay $100 for a 4TB drive, grab 13 of those and you have your 50TB, all for the $1300 which is less than you'd have paid just for a bare tape drive. When hard drives break you swap them out and keep operating at reduced capacity. (I mean, I've done that with tape drives, but back then I had lots of tape drives.)
"Conventional disks are just too expensive." For small amounts of data, like 50TB, tape could quite easily be more expensive due to the fixed costs of the drive. Add the fact that you have to babysit the tape drive and swap in a new tape every so often unless you get a robot to do it for you.
"Conventional disks are too error prone." Not sure what that's about, when you have 50TB of data you're going to need to add error correction no matter whether you write it to tape or write it to HDD. In reality, you're going to have to deal with a loss of a full tape or full drive either way, plus some read errors on the available media.
I don't have exact TCO figures for you, but despite the low cost of media, tape TCO isn't that much lower than HDD, and for small amounts of data, HDD is cheaper.
Maybe, maybe you could make this work. With old refurbished drives and media, and an endless appetite for swapping out tapes, and the right software to index and manage it all, maybe you could achieve your dream while spending less money. But a couple grand will get you the HDD you need.
Re: IBM and Sony cram up to 330TB into tiny tape cartridge
#36Backing up a few PB of data is costly and bulky, since you really must use hard disks. I've been waiting for this tech for years.
In the PB range, current tape technology is very competitive with HDD depending on access patterns and other factors.
Re: IBM and Sony cram up to 330TB into tiny tape cartridge
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
People who are really serious about storage like Google and Backblaze tend to buy those cheap commercial hard drives instead of the expensive enterprise drives. Tape drives for home use don't make much sense sadly. The tapes are too expensive compared to hard drives. It's easier to buy one of those SATA docks if you want to have cold backups. https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E1681715...
> The tapes are too expensive compared to hard drives. That's not at all my experience, at least when it comes to LTO. Sure, TS and T10k are expensive, but they're the 'enterprise solutions'. Modern LTO tapes can be bought for ~$100 if you shop around. Less if you buy in bulk.
Recent generation LTO tapes (LTO-6) can be had for like $25 a pop easily, low volume, just check Amazon or wherever. The LTO-7 are more expensive but that's what you get for latest and greatest.
Re: IBM and Sony cram up to 330TB into tiny tape cartridge
#38Putting a few of their numbers together seems to imply a read bandwidth of 24 Tbps (330 terabytes = 330*8 terabits/tape, tape length = 1098 meters => 2.4 terabits/meter, tape speed = 10 m/s => 24 Tb/s). Which to me is way more interesting than the total storage size. Of course I have no idea what you could actually feed that into, it far exceeds CPU memory bandwidth, let alone SCSI or PCIE. Do these things not actually run at full speed for more than a fraction of a second?
Re: IBM and Sony cram up to 330TB into tiny tape cartridge
#39Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. --Tanenbaum
There was a story out there a while back of a backup company migrating data centers who did just that. Packed up a vehicle full of hard drives and took a road trip.
Re: IBM and Sony cram up to 330TB into tiny tape cartridge
#40Putting a few of their numbers together seems to imply a read bandwidth of 24 Tbps (330 terabytes = 330*8 terabits/tape, tape length = 1098 meters => 2.4 terabits/meter, tape speed = 10 m/s => 24 Tb/s). Which to me is way more interesting than the total storage size. Of course I have no idea what you could actually feed that into, it far exceeds CPU memory bandwidth, let alone SCSI or PCIE. Do these things not actual…
We're no where near 330TB tapes. This was an announcement that they were able to, in a lab, make a few inches of what would be a 330TB tape.
The idea is that when we're at a place where you can reliably manufacture 330TB tapes, fibre channel (or whatever we have then for SAN interconnects) will have caught up.