
Sony develops new 185 TB storage tape - mootothemax
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27282732
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tenfingers
This would make tape worthwhile again if the price is reasonable (<= 100$
cassette).

Currently LTO-6 2.5TB tapes are just useless. Whereas they are generally more
reliable than an hard drive, for the same investment you can just buy more
drives and make up for it, and you gain improved r/w speed and _random_
access, which cannot be overstated (tape is generally a PITA to use).

Not to mention that a single tape drive is only useful if you can backup your
entire system with just one tape. When LTO6 came out, I already couldn't,
making a tape robot necessary. Again, to make things into perspective, today
you can just buy a cheap nas with 2 drives with hotplug, and you still saved
2k$ for the tape drive.

With a 185TB tape you can seriously think to backup an entire site to a couple
of cassettes again. IF price is reasonable.

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valarauca1
>LTO-6 2.5TB tapes are just useless.

Not at all. Oracle and IBM sell data insurance. If you save data on their
tapes, that data will be their for 100 years, or you get a large chunk of
money. This is why corporations still use tapes, HDD's don't offer such
protections.

Sony currently doesn't offer tape insurance. Which if they want this to
succeed they likely will have too as this is the main attraction of tapes.
Safe long term storage.

:.:.:

There are a few technical problems.

The biggest problem overall is write speed. A T1000C tape drive (5TB Oracle)
can take about 4 hours to "Fill". This is with 16 parallel writes (tracks)
taking place.

Having a flat 20x more data to write could mean times in the order of 72+ hour
to preform a full back up (Assume 16 parallel writes, same speed as oracle),
or LONGER!

I really want to see a data sheet on this new tech not hype.

~~~
jonknee
> This is why corporations still use tapes, HDD's don't offer such protections

Well tape drives don't offer insurance either... As you mentioned, Oracle and
IBM do. If you have the cash you can insure anything you'd like, even hard
drives.

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valarauca1
Your missing the fundamental crux of the argument. Yes you _can insure_ a HDD.
But _why_ would you?

HDD don't last 30+ years. Even if you take out a hard drive and set it on your
desk, never touching it again chances are the data will be gone in 10-20 years
due to bit rot (most likely at human survival-able temperatures). Tapes don't
suffer from this (well they do, just at a slower rate due to larger bits).

~~~
jonknee
> HDD don't last 30+ years. Even if you take out a hard drive and set it on
> your desk, never touching it again chances are the data will be gone in
> 10-20 years due to bit rot (most likely at human survival-able
> temperatures). Tapes don't suffer from this (well they do, just at a slower
> rate due to larger bits).

That sounds exactly like a situation you would want insurance... Why insure
the one that never goes bad?

~~~
valarauca1
Honestly I have to ask are you a troll? You understand how insurance works
right? Basically your hedging a long term bet that and event you are insuring
against won't take place.

Lets take life insurance for example, its very cheap on say 20 year olds, who
are active, non-smokers. Because overall a 20 year old, active, non-smoker has
a much lower chance of dropping dead over night then say a 80 year old active,
non-smoker. Its pretty simple stats honestly.

Insuring a HDD for 20+ years is the equivalent of buying a 350 year life
insurance policy for a human. Statically its pretty safe to say that policy
will payout.

If you buy a policy that _will statically_ pay out, it means the policy total
needs to be collected before the event will likely take place, therefore
result in a net profit for the provider.

:.:.:

Example

So you take out a 30 year protection policy on a 2TB hard drive, this policy
will pay 50 million dollars. 80% of Hard Drives fail in 4 years, which means
as an insurer you need to collect AT LEAST 80% of the policy pay out by year 4
of the devices life cycle. This means you'll expect payments of ~1.041 million
a month (at least). For the insurer to break even on your policy over an
infinite amount of hard drives (which they're likely using a finite model), so
a lot more.

Now you take a 30 year tape drive, for 50 million dollars. 1% of drives fail
after 30 years. This means you can collect the total 50 million from at least
100 different contracts, meaning within 30 years each policy will only collect
~5 millions dollars in payments (13k montly payments)

The former seems completely idiotic to both the insurance agency _AND_ the
business asking for it. I don't know what your point is.

:.:.:

TL;DR: For insurance to work (profitably for both parties) you can't have the
certainty of the event occurring within the policies term.

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xhrpost
I remember reading articles about 400GB optical discs being designed back in
2001. Still waiting.

~~~
RogerL
If you didn't happen to read the article, that is being worked on: "Sony is
also working on more consumer-friendly storage - in March it announced it was
working with Panasonic on the Archival Disc, which will hold 1TB of data, the
equivalent of 250 DVD films"

~~~
xhrpost
My point is that these announcements tend not to mean much to consumers until
it actually happens. If it does. Sorry to be a downer, it's just kind of
disappointing. My first PC from '95 had an optical drive capable of holding
more data than the hard drive. Right now, you have 2.5TB tape, you will likely
not see a jump to this but rather 2.5 to 5 to 10, etc. all the way until 185TB
fits the graph.

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tomswartz07
I wonder if these cassettes are susceptible to 'stretching' that pained older
cassette storage media.

As the tape began to wear out, it would 'stretch' and subtly change the
frequency of the data stored on it, causing issues.

Anyone have any further details on this?

~~~
robomartin
A properly engineered tape format will have, for lack of a better name, an
"index" or synchronisation bit or signal recorded alongside the data tracks.
Back in the days of videotape there was something called "control track" that
served a similar purpose. In the video case it was used mostly to ensure the
video being read off tape ran as close as possible to the required video
standard frequency. Smaller mechanical variations where then removed
electronically using a FIFO often called "time base corrector". Similar
approaches can (and should) be used for data tapes in order to ensure data
integrity in the face of tape stretch, etc. The other approach is to encode
the data using a self clocking encoder, in which case data recovery is pretty
much guaranteed at any speed so long as the data read frequency is within the
read circuitry VCO's capture range. These approaches are not mutually
exclusive. I think there have been hybrid optical/magnetic approches also but
I am not familiar with them.

~~~
hga
As a concrete example, you are warned not to use a bulk eraser on LTO tapes
because they have servo tracks that will also get erased.

In the bad old days there were multi-platter disk drives that used e.g. the
bottom surface for a servo track.

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jareds
Was tape ever widely used by consumers? I remember my father buying a tape
drive about the time Windows 95 came out and using it to back up the family
PC. Was this a common thing at that time or was it just the fact that he was a
computer teacher and technically inclined?

~~~
heartbreak
I remember my father backing up the accounting data of the family business to
tape at the end of each month. He did that for several years before eventually
replacing the tapes with flash drives.

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post_break
I'd love to have this. Just like I'd love to have 3 layer bluray discs but
that's a pipe dream. Consumer back up mediums are still in the stone age
besides hard drives.

~~~
minikites
Is there any technical reason tape backup is so expensive and out of reach for
consumers?

~~~
dragontamer
The true cost of tape is that of the tape drive.

Tapes themselves are pretty darn cheap. LTO-5 tapes cost $25 for 1.5TB
(uncompressed). Multi-layer Blu-Ray is the only solution that is anywhere
close to that cheap... but those are a pain-in-the-ass to use. (You'll need
Thirty 50GB Blu-Rays to do the job of a single LTO-5 tape)

Also consider: At x8, BluRays are written at 36 MB/s. Tape Drives are
read/written to at 140MB/s, making them much faster than BluRays.

The problem is that tape drives cost roughly $2000 each. So tapes only become
economical when you're storing 25+ TB of data.

~~~
hga
The other problem is that to prevent "shoe shining", you need a fast storage
system to feed the tape drive. The somewhat slow LTO-4 HP 1760 I use has a
sustained compressed (on the tape drive) speed of 160 MB/s, their a few
hundred dollars more LTO-5 tape drive require 280 MB/s ... and apparently have
two SAS ports. I can get by just fine with one Seagate 15K drive on another
PCI-e card buffering the former, I think you'd need something more intense for
LTO-5, I've read that no single hard drive can keep up with LTO-5 drives.

~~~
dragontamer
For people who are used to ~20MB/s (maximum) off of x4 speed 50GB BluRay
drives, I think the problem you note is a "first world problem"... a problem
many people would be happy to have.

On no! My Tape Drives are written too fast that they're causing me issues :-).
If only my hard drives were fast enough to keep the write buffer full!

~~~
hga
I suppose so in some ways, but shoe shining will prematurely wear out your LTO
tapes and drives.

The L in LTO is for linear: when the tape writes its traveling at over 100
inches per second. Compare to helical scan tape systems like VHS and DAT/DDS
where the tape heads are moving very quickly past the tape but the tape itself
is not really fast at all. So if the write buffer empties, the drive has to
decelerate the tape, wind it back quickly, then accelerate it so it's at full
speed when it's at the location to write a new block.

I might recommend DDS for the 3rd World ^_^. It's what I used until it fell
too far behind hard disk sizes.

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mentos
Interesting that you can now hand someone the entire contents of iTunes on a
cassette.

I wonder how long it'll be until a flash drive can hold this much data? I can
usually find any song I want to listen to on youtube, but I think it'd be
interesting to just have every song locally.

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r00fus
Combined with the new Sandisk 4GB SAS SSD (with 6 and 8TB models to be
announced soon), I wonder what impacts this will have on exa-scale data
storage.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Typo; think you meant 4TB

