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The picture with the tape library makes me wonder why we only have the option of the small tape cartridges of today. It would be super cool to have a horizontal
by reacharavindh 6y ago
The picture with the tape library makes me wonder why we only have the option of the small tape cartridges of today. It would be super cool to have a horizontal arrangement of say 20 such “tape wheels” each with their own R/W head. Imagine the capacity such a unit would achieve with today’s tape medium! Our LTO-8 tape cartridge holds 12 TB of incompressible data. Imagine a wheel that big could hold somewhere like 100 TB or so. If you put 10 of them in a horizontal row, with 10 heads, you get a PB archival machine..
I’d feel badly of our tape robot now.
- Chris2048 6y agoYou can get them, just tape needs the right conditions i.e. temp humidity, or it degrades. I think flammability might also be an issue.
- HeadsUpHigh 6y agoThroughput would suffer. At some point needing multiple weeks to copy the contents of one tape becomes impractical.
- jasomill 6y agoJust for fun: An LTO-8 tape is 960 m long and 5.6 µm thick. A standard-length ANSI-standard 9-track is 2,400 ft long and 0.0015 in thick. So naïvely assuming you could spool about 2,400 ft * (0.0015 in / 5.6 µm) worth of LTO-8 tape on a reel, we have 145161/28000 = (0.0015 in / 5.6 µm) * (2400 ft / 960 m) so your imaginary LTO-8 reel could store around five times as much data as an ordinary LTO-8 cartridge, or about 60 TB. Sounds promising until you realize that, even assuming impossibly efficient cylinder-packing and no additional overhead for automation, a single 9-track reel takes about as much space to store as five LTO cartridges…