
400 TB Storage Drives in Our Future: Fujifilm - caution
https://www.anandtech.com/show/15888/400-tb-storage-drives-in-our-future-fujifilm
======
6c696e7578
Many people don't appreciate tape, but for long term offline storage nothing
else comes close.

Offline storage is important if you care about things like ransomware.

The problem I find with disks for offline storage is that they're very easy to
turn on and very easy to zero. Tapes on the other hand are much more difficult
to get to if you're in the business of ransomware.

~~~
leephillips
Can’t you avoid ransomware by just not using Windows?

~~~
anoonmoose
Linux is not invulnerable to ransomware, it's just easier to secure.

~~~
close04
To add to that, Linux is easier to secure because is found mostly in the
datacenter (I'll ignore Android for this one). It's not only more robust but
it's secured according to a whole different standard than desktops since it
doesn't need to be operated by Average Joe.

On the other hand the vast majority of Windows installations are either
regular home users (with no knowledge for properly setting up their computer,
and ideally with the updates disabled because they read on the internet that
updates are bad) or corporate desktops (which might be secured better but
still at the mercy of a user clicking on everything).

~~~
manquer
Linux and BSD are found in a lot of places, it is more to do with its design
being supportive of all kinds of deployments rather than only just popularity
i think.

Windows Server administrators are lot more likely to be "certified" and
"trained" by MS approved courses than linux admins and of course it does not
help.

I would say its more likely to find an average joe ( _from a devops
perspective_ ) running a linux box than a windows box.

~~~
close04
> average joe ( from a devops perspective)

That's a whole different kind of average joe. A mediocre tech person is still
an order of magnitude more qualified to take care of a machine than a mediocre
user.

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WalterBright
When I graduated from college I stored all my projects on a magtape. About 10
years later I discovered that there were essentially no drives in existence
that could read it, because 1) the drive that created it was hopelessly
obsolete and 2) it had drifted so far out of spec that even a machine of the
same make/model could not read the tape.

I threw it out, and have been soured on tape for long term storage ever since.

Fortunately, I had also downloaded a few files over the phone to a PDP-11 with
an 8" floppy drive. I can no longer read those floppies, but I regularly copy
all my files to new media every year or so.

~~~
Scaevolus
Drive availability is the real downside of tape. You have to rotate tape
libraries to the new media every few generations to avoid getting stuck-- LTO
drives can only read the two previous generations of tape.

This is easy enough to do for tape libraries where you have robots to manage
everything, but really dampens the effectiveness for personal backups.

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jewel
According to the table in the article, improvement from 2010 to 2020 was 7.5×,
from 1.6TB to 12TB. The projected improvements by 2030 are 32×, so I'm a bit
skeptical.

It's too bad that cheaper drives can't be made with old technology. Perhaps by
making much larger cassettes? Everywhere I've worked the total cost of a
backup system built on tape was higher than buying HDDs due to the drive
itself.

~~~
timerol
This doesn't seem like a fair comparison. Based on the table provided, 2010
retail is 1.6 TB, 2020 retail is 24 TB, and 2030 retail is 384 TB. That's a
15x improvement last decade, and a projected 16x improvement next decade.

Whether they're fudging the numbers for the current year to make that math
work is up for debate, as it's 2020 and they aren't yet on LTO-9, with 24 TB
drives

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tzs
Can these LTO drives and tapes be used reasonably for a continuous backup
system? What I want is something that just mirrors all disk writes to the tape
so the tape ends up as essentially a log of all disk writes since the tape was
inserted.

That could have a lot of starting and stopping on the tape, which might be bad
so it would be acceptable to have some sort of buffering so that the tape only
needs to be written when a lot of changes have accumulated.

~~~
StillBored
A number of older systems (zseries ztpf/nonstop/others) are used like this
(basically a log dump on an interval).

LTO is designed to speed match to avoid shoe-shining (rewind/rewrite). AKA the
drive changes the speed the tape is moving past the heads to accommodate the
read/write speed of the application. Which is one of those fun computer cases
where you can literally hear how fast your application is running. The more
recent drives have very large ram buffers to smooth it all out too.

~~~
Dylan16807
To some extent. [https://superuser.com/questions/1121980/lto-tape-
speeds](https://superuser.com/questions/1121980/lto-tape-speeds)
[https://www.quantum.com/globalassets/documents/lto-tech-
brie...](https://www.quantum.com/globalassets/documents/lto-tech-brief.pdf) If
these are representative, then you get about a factor of 3 to vary the speed,
and the minimum is still way too fast to record most live drive use.

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bobbob1921
FWIW an option I use at my home/office is a 2u 12bay supermicro box running
freenas with extra hard drives as the backup DST (Destination).

Using periodic replication on the source (also freenas/ZFS) and some Scripts I
wrote using ipmi to start up the DST box-

I have the DST machine downstairs at my house And once a week for about 12
hours it auto powers up, the auto application starts and after about 12 hours
shut down. (10g uplink)

So outside of 12 hours a week the machine is powered off. Not the best
solution and it does have Some sec holes, but it was something cheap to backup
alot of data.

~~~
nathanallen
This is my approach as well. It's probably not great for the drives since they
have to spin up every power cycle, but it's a lot more energy efficient than
having a server running 24/7!

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imagetic
I honestly hope tape drives drop in price. I'd love to be able to shelf a lot
of data at home.

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numpad0
LTO specifications update at regular schedules employing forced regularized
innovations, something like P times capacity every Q years and R times more
effective storage with compression thanks to new XYZ technology invented after
last update, so that corporate users can easily plan ahead for equipment
upgrades.

That’s not how innovations work but they have been doing that for decades.

------
Nition
I like the top comment chain there where there's a conversation like this:

User A: Tapes are OK, but I wish there was new tech. Probably optical.

User B: Impossible to get this density with optical given wavelength
requirements.

User C: In 2D yes, but maybe with 3D disc storage. The technology isn't there
though.

User B: Consider a tape on its side...

------
hinkley
> As reported by Chris Mellor of Blocks and Files, Fujifilm points to using
> Strontium Ferrite grains in order to enable an areal data density on tape of
> 224 Gbit-per-square-inch, which would enable 400 TB drives.

What keeps us from applying similar tech to HDD?

~~~
saltcured
Hard drives are much higher density already. A quick search shows estimates of
1-2 Tbit/square inch for recent techniques like SMR or HAMR.

Remember that a tape has a huge amount of surface area compared to the small
track area of a few discs. The material science aspects of that flexible tape
flying by a helical scanning head are quite different from the circular tracks
of a hard disk.

------
blackrock
Has anyone ever tested their claimed storage life of 50 years?

~~~
happycube
The problem is you can only read it with an LTO drive 1-2 generations newer,
so by that point all existing drives would likely be at least 30 years old...

~~~
ggm
Since LTO hasn't existed for 50 years the key proposition can't be tested. the
grandfathering clause is only incidental because an older drive, assuming you
could cable the SCSI up correctly would work.

(I recently tried to get a Sun U10's DAT 9mm working, sourcing the SCSI cables
was a nightmare. And then, the drive refused to rotate under UNIX mt <subcmd>
patterns, ejected the tape unread.)

To be less flippant, most 50y claims are tested by doing more intense service
life e.g. high heat, many rewind re-read cycles, to simulate
mechanical/thermal ageing. You cannot really test print-through from just
"sitting there" except by sitting something unread on a shelf for 50 years.

------
narrator
I kind of wonder with drive tech if they know they could have gotten 400TB out
of tape 10 years ago, but they were like.. Meh, we'll slowly scale it up so we
can sell a new drive every year. The progression in the technology is just so
smooth. Well I'm not one of the 200 or so people on planet earth who actually
knows how to manufacture this kind of drive, so I guess I'll never know.

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nullsmack
I was excited until I saw it was tape. Drives will probably be thousands or
tens of thousands of dollars and then the individual tapes would probably be
in the hundreds or more. Since this tech is almost exclusively sold to
enterprises and priced accordingly.

~~~
wazoox
Current prices for LTO-6 is ~20$, LTO-7 ~50$ and LTO-8 under 80$. Try finding
a disk drive that holds at least 12 TB (typically more like 25 TB) for 80
bucks.

~~~
lizknope
Tapes are cheap. Tape drives are very expensive. I can buy 200TB of hard
drives for about the price of an LTO-8 tape drive.

~~~
wazoox
200 TB of LTO-6 : drive ~1500$ + ~50 to 80 20$ tapes = 2500 to 3100$

200 TB of disk : 25 * ~150$ 8TB disks = 3750$

So not really. Tape is generally cheaper overall for any volume over 100 TB.
The question is what you're storing and why. For archival, long conservation,
tape is unbeatable.

I recently opened a case of 32 2 TB drives shelved since 2010 or so. These are
Hitachi Ultrastar drives, the more reliable drives by a large margin. However,
3 of these were dead. Non-running disk drives actually fail as much or even
slightly more than running ones (I have hundreds such drives in machines
running 24/7 for the past 10 to 12 years).

OTOH I've restored 120 LTO-2 tapes from 2002 recently. only one had problems
(but most of the data was readable in the end).

Tape is a great offline storage medium. Disks aren't.

~~~
Wowfunhappy
I wish there was a middle ground. A way I could archive around 10 TB for
around $500. I'm basically stuck with using hard drives + frequent backups and
ZFS scrubs. Which isn't _such_ a bad setup, but I'd like to have something
offline.

I've looked at M-Discs, but at ~$0.12 per gigabyte (for something _completely_
non-rewritable), the price still isn't right.

------
CodeArtisan
330 TBs cartridges from Sony (2017)

[https://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/News/Press/201708/17-070E/](https://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/News/Press/201708/17-070E/)

~~~
IanCutress
Mentioned in the article. There's at least a decade delay between leading edge
and commercialization.

------
nabla9
Question: Is Amazon's “S3 Glacier Deep Archive” storage tape storage?

price: $0.00099- 1 GB, SPEED OF RETRIEVAL: 48 hours for bulk, 12 hours for
standard, FIRST BYTE LATENCY: Select hours

~~~
gpm
> price: $0.00099

This is the advertised price on
[https://aws.amazon.com/glacier/](https://aws.amazon.com/glacier/), but when I
click through to regions, _every_ region is 4 to 5 times as much. Do you know
if I'm missing something?

------
walterbell
Any recommendations for a reliable LTO5 (or newer) autochanger that can be
found on the used gear market?

~~~
mc32
Old dell powervaults?

~~~
justinclift
Be careful with them. If you get one who's firmware is locked, it can be
impossible to unlock.

Saying from experience. Though if it were to happen again these days, I'd
probably just rip out its controller and replace it was an Arduino. :)

~~~
walterbell
What causes a firmware lock?

~~~
justinclift
It was a few years ago, but from rough memory the on device display itself
asks for a password.

I could be mistaken though, and it might be more a web UI thing along the
lines shown here:

[https://www.dell.com/community/PowerVault/PowerVault-124T-Us...](https://www.dell.com/community/PowerVault/PowerVault-124T-Username-
Password/td-p/3004075)

In my case, I do remember being able to control the device using the physical
controls on it, but being blocked when doing "other stuff".

Not really remembering what the "other stuff" was though. The default
admin/password combo, and "how to reset the password" stuff found online
definitely didn't help.

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claudiug
at least, my nodejs projects will all the space necesary.

------
sabujp
used to run TSM feeding into 6 LTO6 drives off a gpfs cluster with snapshots,
much fun

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throw0101a
Meta:

Should the format of these types of headlines be:

* Some Important Statement: Speaker (Fujifilm here)

Or should it be:

* Speaker: Some Important Statement

Is one more 'proper' than the other?

~~~
pessimizer
The colon just seems like a copula to me, and both "the sky is blue" and "blue
is the sky" work. I guess putting the smaller thing first (like the quote)
comes off as a little poetic?

