
IBM and Sony cram up to 330TB into tiny tape cartridge - 076ae80a-3c97-4
https://arstechnica.co.uk/information-technology/2017/08/ibm-and-sony-cram-up-to-330tb-into-tiny-tape-cartridge/
======
brudgers
_Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling
down the highway._ \--Tanenbaum

~~~
adtac
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 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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_truck#Size_and_volume)
[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limits_in_the_United_Sta...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limits_in_the_United_States)
[3] [https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/192929-255tbps-worlds-
fa...](https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/192929-255tbps-worlds-fastest-
network-could-carry-all-the-internet-traffic-single-fiber)

~~~
gruez
You need to factor in the time needed to transfer the data onto/off the
drives.

~~~
jandrese
It depends on what you're doing with the data. If you're moving it to some
long term archive then you only need to count the write time of the disks at
the source, packing time, and unpacking time.

If you're planning to actually use the data you need to add in the time need
to read the tapes and put them on a usable medium.

Once you add in all of the overhead, the network comes out looking much better
in comparison.

~~~
Twirrim
>Once you add in all of the overhead, the network comes out looking much
better in comparison.

That's a broad assumption. There's a reason why AWS is finding demand for
Snowball and Snowmobile. Internet connections just aren't that fast.

~~~
jandrese
In total bandwidth the truck is still likely to win, but it won't be a 75x
advantage. Closer to 3-4x.

Also note that the Snowball/Snowmobile fit into the first use case. They are
loaded up then just plugged in on arrival, and even then the total number of
enterprises that have used the services is not very large. The multi-day
latency on the first packet means you need to be transferring enough data that
it would take more than those few days to transfer on a STM-4 or similar. It
works out to a tremendous amount of data.

Of course if you are an arctic researcher who has collected hundreds of
petabytes of sensor measurements and only have a satellite backhaul, then this
makes tons of sense. But for anybody with a solid backbone connection the
calculus is much less favorable.

------
sgt
I 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 disks are just too expensive and error prone.

~~~
klodolph
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.

~~~
sgt
You had me at the 2nd paragraph. I'm also one of those who'll turn around and
order a stack of HDD's. Capex is just too high. I find it quite funny that you
think 50TB is considered "small amounts of data", but I suppose all is
relative.

For a business however (if I had huge amounts of data that needed archiving
i.e. >100TB) then I would definitely go the tape route. Or Glacier if I
decided to be sensible.

------
angrygoat
One of the main reasons tape is still used in scientific applications is its
durability and robustness when transported, the price of the cartridges is
less of a factor.

In exploration geophysics extremely large amounts of data are recorded onto
tapes when acquiring in the field, and then either transferred over
sea/land/air in a packing case to a processing centre. I wonder if this new
tech will prove just as durable as current tape tech?

------
scott00
Putting 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?

~~~
monocasa
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.

~~~
scott00
I realize this is a long way off from production. I guess what I was saying is
I think the notion that we may have a 24 Tbps tape drive in 10 years more
interesting than the notion that we may have a 330 TB tape drive in 10 years.
And I'm wondering if my logic for the bandwidth is faulty, or if that might
actually be doable with this technology (eventually).

------
tim333
They should copy Soundcloud's 900TB as a demo

------
tjoff
_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 transfer) for home
use (my opinion / use case).

~~~
Shivetya
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 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?

~~~
jandrese
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...](https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817153066&ignorebbr=1&nm_mc=KNC-
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~~~
monocasa
> 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.

~~~
klodolph
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.

------
paulrpotts
"Areal" density (bits per unit area), not "Aerial" density (bits in the
atmosphere?)

------
piker
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?

~~~
jonatron
According to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-
Open#Positioning_t...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-
Open#Positioning_times) , in the region of 50 seconds, which isn't really good
enough.

~~~
LeifCarrotson
I'm sure there's long-tail data on YouTube for which terabytes of files that
could be backed up to tape are accessed far more slowly than every 50 seconds.
I agree that this would not be a great user experience, but there's certainly
a place for it, especially if the cost/terabyte is compelling.

~~~
jandrese
The other problem is that Hard Drives are cheap as hell and tapes, especially
ones loaded into automatic robots, are really not that cheap.

It's the perennial disappointment with tape drives that the media has
"enterprise" pricing, making it barely better per TB than cheap consumer
spinning hard drives.

------
digi_owl
The one thing that has puzzled me for years is why tape never caught on with
consumers.

Too much risk that people confuse it with music cassettes?

Or perhaps too fiddly software to deal with? for me a more likely reason why
USB drives overtook optical media than the media itself, btw.

------
Krunkel
What kind of read/write speeds are these tapes capable of?

~~~
dom0
Commercial drives you can buy right now write at more than 150 MB/s, newer
generations are always faster.

------
mailslot
Backing 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.

~~~
klodolph
In the PB range, current tape technology is very competitive with HDD
depending on access patterns and other factors.

------
Kostic
Can anyone speculate about the price for one unit?

~~~
tallanvor
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.

~~~
monocasa
> will probably be available by the end of next year.

I'd be surprised if it took that long.

~~~
tallanvor
I agree, but I'm going based on the road map, which plans for that version to
become available this year or next year.

------
velebak
They can go cram it, for all I care.

------
codecamper
It can now store 330 million books. We better get started writing!

------
visarga
Kim Jong Un should make sure one of these things filled with music and movies
doesn't get into N Korea. It would destroy their propaganda war.

