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IBM and Sony cram up to 330TB into tiny tape cartridge
- tim333 9y agoThey should copy Soundcloud's 900TB as a demo
- Kostic 9y agoCan anyone speculate about the price for one unit?
- sengork 9y agoPrice per TB would be the more important measure for this kind of storage equipment. For reference and to put things in context one has to look at LTO generations. From what I see their invention would fall beyond the LTO-10 standard (unless the market forces and manufacturing change dramatically by then). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open#Generations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open#Generations
- tallanvor 9y agoHard 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.
- brudgers 9y agoNever underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. --Tanenbaum
- adtac 9y agoLet'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_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limits_in_the_United_Sta... [3] https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/192929-255tbps-worlds-fastest-network-could-carry-all-the-internet-traffic-single-fiber https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/192929-255tbps-worlds-fa...
- sharpshadow 9y agoLovely :'D
- gruez 9y agoYou need to factor in the time needed to transfer the data onto/off the drives.
- jandrese 9y agoIt 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.
- angrygoat 9y agoOne 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?
- tjoff 9y agoNote 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 9y agowell 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 9y agoPeople 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=N82E16817153066&ignorebbr=1&nm_mc=KNC-GoogleAdwords-PC&cm_mmc=KNC-GoogleAdwords-PC-_-pla-_-External+Enclosure-_-N82E16817153066&gclid=CjwKCAjw8IXMBRB8EiwAg9fgMDIcYYxU2aTEjwgGm36APK2VaoP4Vp7MxKnas3QYrfIDCs_b7O8LmhoCKL8QAvD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E1681715...
- monocasa 9y ago> 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.
- codecamper 9y agoIt can now store 330 million books. We better get started writing!
- piker 9y agoHonest 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 9y agoAccording to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open#Positioning_times https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open#Positioning_t... , in the region of 50 seconds, which isn't really good enough.
- LeifCarrotson 9y agoI'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 9y agoThe 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.
- gwbas1c 9y agoProbably not for serving user requests for content. But, if Youtube archived the original upload on tape before transcoding to a different format, then it would be useful. The tapes would really only be "read," in a batch manner, when they want to re-transcode to a newer codec. Likewise, tape would be a great way to store the digital equivalent of the "negatives" once a movie, TV show, or music album is complete. No one needs instant, on-demand, random access to every shot, every take, and every camera angle. It can be pulled off the tape in 10 years when producing the Nth remaster for the new super-duper bluray version.
- Krunkel 9y agoWhat kind of read/write speeds are these tapes capable of?
- dom0 9y agoCommercial drives you can buy right now write at more than 150 MB/s, newer generations are always faster.
- visarga 9y agoKim 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.
- sgt 9y agoI 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 9y agoDefine "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.
- paulrpotts 9y ago"Areal" density (bits per unit area), not "Aerial" density (bits in the atmosphere?)
- mailslot 9y agoBacking 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 9y agoIn the PB range, current tape technology is very competitive with HDD depending on access patterns and other factors.
- scott00 9y agoPutting 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 9y agoWe'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 9y agoI 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).
- velebak 9y agoThey can go cram it, for all I care.
- digi_owl 9y agoThe 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.