4 ms·

Hm, tape drives aren't even sold anymore, otherwise I might try.

• gwern 16y ago
  It may not be a bad idea to borrow old tape-drive ideas for modern technologies - I mean, hard drives are ever slower compared to cache or RAM, and they are faster at linear seeks (like tapes) than random-access. Hard drives are the new tape?
  • whatusername 16y ago
    Tapes are the new Hard Drive. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape_File_System http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape_File_System A Random Access Filesystem that runs on LTO5. (And it even supports OSX!) Cool hack. Just don't ask me why they bothered.
• moopark 16y ago
  Sure they are -- tape libraries are still sold, primarily for backups, eg: http://www.quantum.com/Products/TapeLibraries/index.aspx http://www.quantum.com/Products/TapeLibraries/index.aspx http://www.dell.com/us/en/enterprise/storage/tapebackup_automation/cp.aspx?refid=tapebackup_automation&cs=555&s=biz http://www.dell.com/us/en/enterprise/storage/tapebackup_auto...
• whatusername 16y ago
  If you ever get a chance to poke around a large corporate data center -- see if you can check out a SL8500 or one of the TS3500 units.. They're the big things with all kinds of flying robotic arms and crap-loads of storage. Just don't try and walk inside one while the robots are moving. For reference -- an LTO5 Tape holds about 3TB of data. (and has decent compression -- so that could go much higher)