15 ms·
400 TB Storage Drives in Our Future: Fujifilm
- walterbell 6y agoAny recommendations for a reliable LTO5 (or newer) autochanger that can be found on the used gear market?
- mc32 6y agoOld dell powervaults?
- justinclift 6y agoBe careful with them. If you get one who's firmware is locked, it can be impossible to unlock. Saying from experience. Though if it were to happen again these days, I'd probably just rip out its controller and replace it was an Arduino. :)
- walterbell 6y agoWhat causes a firmware lock?
- justinclift 6y agoIt was a few years ago, but from rough memory the on device display itself asks for a password. I could be mistaken though, and it might be more a web UI thing along the lines shown here: https://www.dell.com/community/PowerVault/PowerVault-124T-Username-Password/td-p/3004075 https://www.dell.com/community/PowerVault/PowerVault-124T-Us... In my case, I do remember being able to control the device using the physical controls on it, but being blocked when doing "other stuff". Not really remembering what the "other stuff" was though. The default admin/password combo, and "how to reset the password" stuff found online definitely didn't help.
- jewel 6y agoAccording to the table in the article, improvement from 2010 to 2020 was 7.5×, from 1.6TB to 12TB. The projected improvements by 2030 are 32×, so I'm a bit skeptical. It's too bad that cheaper drives can't be made with old technology. Perhaps by making much larger cassettes? Everywhere I've worked the total cost of a backup system built on tape was higher than buying HDDs due to the drive itself.
- timerol 6y agoThis doesn't seem like a fair comparison. Based on the table provided, 2010 retail is 1.6 TB, 2020 retail is 24 TB, and 2030 retail is 384 TB. That's a 15x improvement last decade, and a projected 16x improvement next decade. Whether they're fudging the numbers for the current year to make that math work is up for debate, as it's 2020 and they aren't yet on LTO-9, with 24 TB drives
- bufferoverflow 6y ago7.5× in 10 years, 7.5× in another 10 years. That's 56× overall. If anything, it's a conservative estimate.
- 6c696e7578 6y agoMany people don't appreciate tape, but for long term offline storage nothing else comes close. Offline storage is important if you care about things like ransomware. The problem I find with disks for offline storage is that they're very easy to turn on and very easy to zero. Tapes on the other hand are much more difficult to get to if you're in the business of ransomware.
- nullc 6y agoTo be fair, this could be addressed via a firmware enforced write protect switch on the drive... or an electronically settable ball-point-pen resettable write-breaker. There are company now that sell drives with special WORM firmware. I love tape but the economics of tape really just don't look good today. The patent litigation over LTO8 basically assured that. Whole nearline SATA drives are significantly less expensive per byte than LTO8 tapes, even ignoring LTO drive/library costs.
- est31 6y ago> Whole nearline SATA drives are significantly less expensive per byte than LTO8 tapes, even ignoring LTO drive/library costs. In Germany, using non-bulk prices, HDDs seem to start at 19€ per TB while I could find multi-write LTO8 tapes costing 8€ per (compression disabled) TB.
- nullc 6y agoOh. That is a massive change over the last 6 months. Okay, they're much closer now.
- throwaway2048 6y agothere was a huge patent fight that delayed the production of LTO8 tapes for quite some time, when they finally released they commanded a huge premium, they are still inflated in price compared to LTO7 tapes per GB.
- Dylan16807 6y ago
- throw0101a 6y agoMeta: Should the format of these types of headlines be: * Some Important Statement: Speaker (Fujifilm here) Or should it be: * Speaker: Some Important Statement Is one more 'proper' than the other?
- pessimizer 6y agoThe colon just seems like a copula to me, and both "the sky is blue" and "blue is the sky" work. I guess putting the smaller thing first (like the quote) comes off as a little poetic?
- numpad0 6y agoLTO specifications update at regular schedules employing forced regularized innovations, something like P times capacity every Q years and R times more effective storage with compression thanks to new XYZ technology invented after last update, so that corporate users can easily plan ahead for equipment upgrades. That’s not how innovations work but they have been doing that for decades.
- blackrock 6y agoHas anyone ever tested their claimed storage life of 50 years?
- happycube 6y agoThe problem is you can only read it with an LTO drive 1-2 generations newer, so by that point all existing drives would likely be at least 30 years old...
- ggm 6y agoSince LTO hasn't existed for 50 years the key proposition can't be tested. the grandfathering clause is only incidental because an older drive, assuming you could cable the SCSI up correctly would work. (I recently tried to get a Sun U10's DAT 9mm working, sourcing the SCSI cables was a nightmare. And then, the drive refused to rotate under UNIX mt <subcmd> patterns, ejected the tape unread.) To be less flippant, most 50y claims are tested by doing more intense service life e.g. high heat, many rewind re-read cycles, to simulate mechanical/thermal ageing. You cannot really test print-through from just "sitting there" except by sitting something unread on a shelf for 50 years.
- bobbob1921 6y agoFWIW an option I use at my home/office is a 2u 12bay supermicro box running freenas with extra hard drives as the backup DST (Destination). Using periodic replication on the source (also freenas/ZFS) and some Scripts I wrote using ipmi to start up the DST box- I have the DST machine downstairs at my house And once a week for about 12 hours it auto powers up, the auto application starts and after about 12 hours shut down. (10g uplink) So outside of 12 hours a week the machine is powered off. Not the best solution and it does have Some sec holes, but it was something cheap to backup alot of data.
- nathanallen 6y agoThis is my approach as well. It's probably not great for the drives since they have to spin up every power cycle, but it's a lot more energy efficient than having a server running 24/7!
- hinkley 6y ago> As reported by Chris Mellor of Blocks and Files, Fujifilm points to using Strontium Ferrite grains in order to enable an areal data density on tape of 224 Gbit-per-square-inch, which would enable 400 TB drives. What keeps us from applying similar tech to HDD?
- brokensegue 6y agoHDDs already have higher data density on their platters. In excess of 1000Gbpsi
- saltcured 6y agoHard drives are much higher density already. A quick search shows estimates of 1-2 Tbit/square inch for recent techniques like SMR or HAMR. Remember that a tape has a huge amount of surface area compared to the small track area of a few discs. The material science aspects of that flexible tape flying by a helical scanning head are quite different from the circular tracks of a hard disk.
- CodeArtisan 6y ago330 TBs cartridges from Sony (2017) https://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/News/Press/201708/17-070E/ https://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/News/Press/201708/17-070E/
- IanCutress 6y agoMentioned in the article. There's at least a decade delay between leading edge and commercialization.
- nullsmack 6y agoI was excited until I saw it was tape. Drives will probably be thousands or tens of thousands of dollars and then the individual tapes would probably be in the hundreds or more. Since this tech is almost exclusively sold to enterprises and priced accordingly.
- wazoox 6y agoCurrent prices for LTO-6 is ~20$, LTO-7 ~50$ and LTO-8 under 80$. Try finding a disk drive that holds at least 12 TB (typically more like 25 TB) for 80 bucks.
- lizknope 6y agoTapes are cheap. Tape drives are very expensive. I can buy 200TB of hard drives for about the price of an LTO-8 tape drive.
- wazoox 6y ago200 TB of LTO-6 : drive ~1500$ + ~50 to 80 20$ tapes = 2500 to 3100$ 200 TB of disk : 25 * ~150$ 8TB disks = 3750$ So not really. Tape is generally cheaper overall for any volume over 100 TB. The question is what you're storing and why. For archival, long conservation, tape is unbeatable. I recently opened a case of 32 2 TB drives shelved since 2010 or so. These are Hitachi Ultrastar drives, the more reliable drives by a large margin. However, 3 of these were dead. Non-running disk drives actually fail as much or even slightly more than running ones (I have hundreds such drives in machines running 24/7 for the past 10 to 12 years). OTOH I've restored 120 LTO-2 tapes from 2002 recently. only one had problems (but most of the data was readable in the end). Tape is a great offline storage medium. Disks aren't.
- Wowfunhappy 6y agoI wish there was a middle ground. A way I could archive around 10 TB for around $500. I'm basically stuck with using hard drives + frequent backups and ZFS scrubs. Which isn't such a bad setup, but I'd like to have something offline. I've looked at M-Discs, but at ~$0.12 per gigabyte (for something completely non-rewritable), the price still isn't right.
- tzs 6y agoCan these LTO drives and tapes be used reasonably for a continuous backup system? What I want is something that just mirrors all disk writes to the tape so the tape ends up as essentially a log of all disk writes since the tape was inserted. That could have a lot of starting and stopping on the tape, which might be bad so it would be acceptable to have some sort of buffering so that the tape only needs to be written when a lot of changes have accumulated.
- StillBored 6y agoA number of older systems (zseries ztpf/nonstop/others) are used like this (basically a log dump on an interval). LTO is designed to speed match to avoid shoe-shining (rewind/rewrite). AKA the drive changes the speed the tape is moving past the heads to accommodate the read/write speed of the application. Which is one of those fun computer cases where you can literally hear how fast your application is running. The more recent drives have very large ram buffers to smooth it all out too.
- Dylan16807 6y agoTo some extent. https://superuser.com/questions/1121980/lto-tape-speeds https://superuser.com/questions/1121980/lto-tape-speeds https://www.quantum.com/globalassets/documents/lto-tech-brief.pdf https://www.quantum.com/globalassets/documents/lto-tech-brie... If these are representative, then you get about a factor of 3 to vary the speed, and the minimum is still way too fast to record most live drive use.
- claudiug 6y agoat least, my nodejs projects will all the space necesary.
- WalterBright 6y agoWhen I graduated from college I stored all my projects on a magtape. About 10 years later I discovered that there were essentially no drives in existence that could read it, because 1) the drive that created it was hopelessly obsolete and 2) it had drifted so far out of spec that even a machine of the same make/model could not read the tape. I threw it out, and have been soured on tape for long term storage ever since. Fortunately, I had also downloaded a few files over the phone to a PDP-11 with an 8" floppy drive. I can no longer read those floppies, but I regularly copy all my files to new media every year or so.
- Scaevolus 6y agoDrive availability is the real downside of tape. You have to rotate tape libraries to the new media every few generations to avoid getting stuck-- LTO drives can only read the two previous generations of tape. This is easy enough to do for tape libraries where you have robots to manage everything, but really dampens the effectiveness for personal backups.
- narrator 6y agoI kind of wonder with drive tech if they know they could have gotten 400TB out of tape 10 years ago, but they were like.. Meh, we'll slowly scale it up so we can sell a new drive every year. The progression in the technology is just so smooth. Well I'm not one of the 200 or so people on planet earth who actually knows how to manufacture this kind of drive, so I guess I'll never know.
- imagetic 6y agoI honestly hope tape drives drop in price. I'd love to be able to shelf a lot of data at home.
- Nition 6y agoI like the top comment chain there where there's a conversation like this: User A: Tapes are OK, but I wish there was new tech. Probably optical. User B: Impossible to get this density with optical given wavelength requirements. User C: In 2D yes, but maybe with 3D disc storage. The technology isn't there though. User B: Consider a tape on its side...
- sabujp 6y agoused to run TSM feeding into 6 LTO6 drives off a gpfs cluster with snapshots, much fun
- nabla9 6y agoQuestion: Is Amazon's “S3 Glacier Deep Archive” storage tape storage? price: $0.00099- 1 GB, SPEED OF RETRIEVAL: 48 hours for bulk, 12 hours for standard, FIRST BYTE LATENCY: Select hours
- gpm 6y ago> price: $0.00099 This is the advertised price on https://aws.amazon.com/glacier/ https://aws.amazon.com/glacier/, but when I click through to regions, every region is 4 to 5 times as much. Do you know if I'm missing something?