4 ms·
When will there be cheap permanent mass storages for archiving?
As people are producing more and more data every day (pictures, videos in better and better quality), there must be a high demand for very large permanent storages. In my impression, the only way for mass storage is to buy expensive HDDs. While in the 90ies there were CDs, that could serve the market, there does not seem to be an equivalent to please today's demands. There seems to be development in optical disk storages, but with at most 500GB (experimental) they are far below actual needs. Already 20 years ago the company Creo produced optical tapes that were able to store 1TB of data. What happened? What are the (technical and maybe commercial?) problems in building cheap mass storages for commercial use?
- svennek 8y agoFirst of all, permanent is a hard challenge, and CDs (as you mentioned) generally was good somewhere between 1 and 10 years, not more. I know the danish national library spends quite some time transferring archives from CD to a newer CD. I think backup tapes are still the best bet (as long as they are LTO-based). Built for longetivity (some/most have stated lifespans of 30 years on a shelf, YMMV) and an open format (i.e. three completely separate business building drives that can read each others tapes). The LTO tapedrives also do in-flight test of the writes (at full speed), so that an failed write will never be unnoticed. Actually they have a write head, then a read head then another write head and another read-head. When you write to the tape, writehead1 writes it and readhead1 checks it. If it fails, it retries with writehead2/readhead2 .. If that fails too, the backup is aborted and the tape is marked (in tapemedia-internal memory) as bad. The bummer for a private person is that even though the tapes themselves are relatively cheap (around 200USD for a 6 TB tape, that can take up to 15TB depending on compression rate of your content) the drives are expensive as heck (due to a lot of smarts), think 5k USD range. Another benefit is that if a drive goes bad, it can be exchanged without the datamedia being exchanged as well (the same is true for CD/DVDs but not for harddrives or SSDs). But as always, if you don't have three copies (on different media/sites/...) of your data, you actually don't have any copies at all.
- anoncoward111 8y agoI used to sell tape drives at Oracle. There is certainly a lot of smarts going into designing a tape drive, but 5k for an enterprise is cheap compared to 23k or more for a proprietary drive with double the read/write. What I think really happened in this industry was that the higher ups laid off all the tape engineers (mostly US based) and just decided to go all in on the "everything on an SSD!" paradigm. It's outsourced to Asia, it works for maybe 90% of corporate workloads, and it makes the Big IT cartel a ton more money than LTO does :/
- c_void 8y agoIn the mid 90ies there were 9GB hard drives availabe, which is roughly the same amount of data that fits on 14 CDs. Today we have 14TB sized HDDs, so an equivalent optical disk should be able to store 1TB of data. However today a private person easily has more than one device plus several external HDDs to store his or her data. So I guess it would not be too greedy to demand permanent media with a capacity of 10TB. Comparing with CDs the price could be 2USD. So in this comparison I honestly find a 6TB tape for 200USD incredibly expensive.
- drallison 8y agoC_void's question is ill formed. What do you mean by "cheap" and "permanent"? What constitutes "mass storage"? "[A]chiving" suggests durability over time, but how much time? What sort of access time would be acceptable? The lede paragraph provides some context but is not explicit. What is the application contemplated?
- c_void 8y agoYou are right in that I was little explicit. Let us talk about a private persons need and let us stay at the comparison with CDs as they were available in the 90ies. In another reply I derived today's needed disk size as 1-10TB. Let us also say that the access time should suffice to be able to watch a 4k resolved movie. You say archiving suggests durability and CDs may not have the same durability as tape storages. However I would say that a cheap price would compensate a possible lack of durability, because one could easily duplicate or restore important data.