185TB Cassette Tape

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hatt

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Dinosaur tech still relevant.
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Stupid hipster 80s fetishism notwithstanding, cassette tapes don't get much love. That's a shame, because magnetic tape is still a surprisingly robust way to back up data. Especially now: Sony just unveiled tape that holds a whopping 148 GB per square inch, meaning a cassette could hold 185 TB of data. Prepare for the mixtape to end all mixtapes.


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NSA gonna buy a bunch?
27.gif
 
Originally Posted By: eljefino
NSA gonna buy a bunch?
27.gif

Doubt it. The NSA would only use the most expensive option to save everyone's data.
 
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That's a shame, because magnetic tape is still a surprisingly robust way to back up data.


Right. You don't know whether your backup is any good until you go to use it..... and it works, you're surprised.
 
Haha I still have my old Commodore Vic-20 stored in a box somewhere,complete with cassette tape drive!
 
There's an interesting tape-based filesystem that was released in 2010, I think. LTFS. You can drag-and-drop files to and from the tape. About 30 seconds later, the tape drive spins and the files are written to tape. I played with it a little when verifying a tape drive was working properly with RHEL6.

I'm told animation studios use it a lot, because hi-def video takes a lot of storage and every animator has to turn in updates. It's too much (and probably too clumsy) for HDDs to deal with.

Cuts from theregister.co.uk:
The crystals that are used to record data are much smaller than previously created, averaging 7.7 nanometers across, and this, along with their precise alignment, gives data densities of 148 Gb per square inch of tape.

To put that figure into perspective, the first magnetic storage tape, used by UNIVAC in 1951, was only capable of handling 128 characters per square inch, and the LTO-6 high-end LTO Ultrium tape currently used can manage just 2Gb per square inch.
 
Heck, I'm still installing tape libraries like these in customer sites:

http://www.oracle.com/us/products/server...sons/index.html

You can put about 10k tape cartridges and 64 tape drives in a single SL8500 and string 10 of them together with pass-through ports to have 640 drives and 100k total cartridge storage space.

I have a customer with a 10 library string. There are 80 robots working to move cartridges around in that complex.

I think tape backup is better at the high end than it is for your typical desktop. The biggest danger is the handling of the tapes. If the operators drop them, etc, then you run the risk of losing that tape.

Stuff happens to tape. That's why you don't rely on a single tape, but a series of tapes to best ensure you get your data back should you need it.

You may be able to backup to the cloud. But sometimes you simply need a backup that isn't easily erased or destroyed by a malicious or inept employee armed with a keyboard. Or you need one that is located somewhere else in case of a disaster like flood, fire or other accident.
 
Tape is still very useful for large amount of data that needs only sequential access with predictability. Whatever technical improvement hard drives had in the last decade, magnetic tape gets it eventually and you can store much more information because of the much larger surface area.
 
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