8 ms·

Aw, c'mon chaps! Can we just admire the tech for a second? > Data on the tape is stored at a record-breaking density of 317 gigabytes per square inch... > Whe

by fernly 6y ago

Aw, c'mon chaps! Can we just admire the tech for a second? > Data on the tape is stored at a record-breaking density of 317 gigabytes per square inch... > When tape is being read it is streamed over the head at a speed of about 15 km/h and with our new servo technologies we are still able to position the tape head with an accuracy that is about 1.5 times the width of a DNA molecule.

daRealDodo 6y ago
> Data on the tape is stored at a record-breaking density of 317 gigabytes per square inch Me wondering about those micro SD cards that can store 1Tb.
- VoxPelli 6y ago
  It probably references the density within the data tape world, which is significant as there could be other ways to achieve a higher total storage, but this is one of the major components here it seems
- luma 6y ago
  Maybe around an order of magnitude more. The big difference is that square inch of tape might be 3-5 orders of magnitude cheaper to manufacture.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Widdershin 6y ago
  Fair enough but chances are the tapes will have a much longer lifetime for storing data, which is the primary use case for this sort of thing.
- reitzensteinm 6y ago
  Those SD cards aren't close to a single layer, so it's not really equivalent. Ad absurdum, stacking two Micro SD cards on top of one another hasn't just doubled your density even though surface area is unchanged.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- adrian_b 6y ago
  The density of flash memory is competitive with magnetic tapes, but the retention time is too low, making flash memory completely unusable for archival storage, even if it would have been as cheap as magnetic tape. In theory, write-once memory cards, using some kind of antifuses, could be designed to have a lifetime good enough for archival storage, but nobody has attempted to develop such a technology, because it is not clear if there would be a market for them. Most people do not think far ahead in the future, so they do not care much about archival data storage, until it is too late and the information had already been lost.
  - Dylan16807 6y ago
    > The density of flash memory is competitive with magnetic tapes, but the retention time is too low, making flash memory completely unusable for archival storage, even if it would have been as cheap as magnetic tape. I disagree that it's unusable. You'd end up with a puck the size of a data tape that can archive a petabyte of data and needs to be plugged in to a 5 watt power supply for long term storage. That's not super onerous. Then consider that tapes need to be stored at exactly room temperature with 20-50 percent humidity, while this puck would barely care about environment at all. And you could plug it directly into a computer without a $5k drive. Honestly it sounds pretty good to me. We just need to drop the price of flash by a factor of 20 to make the scenario happen.
VoxPelli 6y ago
Loveliest part was the part right before that: “Just let me geek out for a second” Absolutely IBM storage person, the more geeking out the better!
- samstave 6y ago
  "Let me just surveillance out for a second" Guess where this will have the biggest impact in the next decade - the long term storage of billions of personally invading surveillance data points forever... Seriously, this tech will be abused. Against everyone. Facial recognition much? Zoom data? TikTok Data in a very compact physical form-factor? Utah and China will LOVE this!
  - Synaesthesia 6y ago
    Data storage is already so cheap thanks to HDDs that a poor African country can afford to spy on its population. This will hardly change anything. If we want to do something about it we have to revolt in the streets.
    - ddingus 6y ago
      The tape may well be the better scenario. With a pile of random access devices, the time and cost of a single record retrieve is low, though the cost of bulk records can get high. All the oppressors need is a half decade window, maybe a decade to be pretty much golden, as far as totalitarianism goes. The tape will definitely hold the data, and then some apparently. But access costs go up. The drives seem to encourage indiscriminate targeting. Tapes would at least favor some priority. The smarter bears will use both! You are not wrong about what it will take.
      - cm2187 6y ago
        In a world where we hold people accountable for stupid things they did or said when they were teenagers, I can see a lot of blackmail value in retaining data for a much longer period of time.
ajnin 6y ago
> 15 km/h The tape stores 580TB for a length of 1255m, does that mean the read speed is 580TB/1255m*15km/h = 1.9TB/s ? Seems too high.
- jeremyjh 6y ago
  I'm guessing that is the fastest it can traverse the tape, it didn't say it could read at that speed.
  - LeifCarrotson 6y ago
    > When tape is being read it is streamed over the head at a speed of about 15 km/h... It did say that. I wonder if there's some multi-track/double-layer/double-sided stuff going on that needs multiple passes to read, that does sound awful fast!
    - texse 6y ago
      Most recent tape standards have multiple "bands" and "wraps" placed in parallel. The head reads only one wrap at a time, so it takes many passes to read the whole tape. For example an LTO-8 tape has 52 wraps each within 4 bands, requiring 208 passes to read completely.
      - TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
        Why not just have multiple heads then?
        nine_k 6y ago
        Positioning the tape should become harder, I suppose. Also, I suppose they limit the read bandwidth with something like what a single Infiniband connection would support; few disk arrays support much higher speeds.
        paulmd 6y ago
        It would be like downloading a file using GetRight back in the day, where you'd have one thread downloading the 0-25% chunk, one downloading the 25-50% chunk, and so on. You could hypothetically do that, for sure, but the software basically is derived from the tape era where you'd just have one logical stream coming out of the tape.
dmix 6y ago
I inherently want to know how this works but I suck at physics and I’m just going to simply also stare in aw from the outside.
ddingus 6y ago
Absolutely. I had no idea tape was being pushed to these levels! Crazy good tech accomplishment right there. In a way, I am somehow comforted. Tape remaining relevant kind of dropped off my radar. Good to see. 317Gb / square inch AND 15km/h transport speed? That is nuts fast. Wonder how robust it really is? Of course at those densities and potential transfer rates there is ample room for error recovery.
- paulmd 6y ago
  It has never really entered the public consciousness since it's not a consumer-facing technology but tape development has continued apace. LTO-9 should be hitting the market very soon and supports up to 45TB per tape (compressed capacity, 18TB raw). Not quite sure where IBM's numbers here come from, their previous numbers don't match up to the progression of the LTO tape series' capacity. Maybe they are citing "research numbers" that they can do in a lab but aren't production-ready yet. I would certainly assume they are citing "compressed" data figured there. But certainly tape has continued to progress much faster than most people would have imagined. Big tape libraries are still a thing in certain environments and they work very well, there is no better solution for bulk cold storage.
  - Dylan16807 6y ago
    > LTO-9 should be hitting the market very soon and supports up to 45TB per tape (compressed capacity, 18TB raw). LTO is cool and all but is the "compressed capacity" number really something to repeat with a straight face? The tape holds 18TB, we don't need to pretend it's anything else. > But certainly tape has continued to progress much faster than most people would have imagined. Mostly it has. But I'm somewhat worried about the future after the sudden late-game announcement that LTO-9 would have a 50% capacity improvement instead of the usual doubling.
    - jabl 6y ago
      > LTO is cool and all but is the "compressed capacity" number really something to repeat with a straight face? No, but it's been the standard in the tape industry for decades. Probably dates back to the first tape controllers that had builtin compression (so compression didn't tax the main cpu).
NiceWayToDoIT 6y ago
With that kind of precision I would like to know what kind of system they use to reduce outside mechanical vibrations?
- guenthert 6y ago
  It isn't mentioned and I don't expect much other then inertia of the device itself. There is a servo mechanism assuring the head follows the tracks on tape. Improvements on that are mentioned. I don't think it matters whether the tape (necessarily) or the environment vibrates or whether that distinction is meaningful.
0df8dkdf 6y ago
317 gb per square inch That seem perfectly reasonable. You can get 256 USB flash in in size about half square inch, and that is random access data. (e.g: https://www.walmart.com/ip/SAMSUNG-256GB-Bar-Plus-Titan-Gray-USB-Flash-Drive/454134260 https://www.walmart.com/ip/SAMSUNG-256GB-Bar-Plus-Titan-Gray... )
thamer 6y ago
> Data on the tape is stored at a record-breaking density of 317 gigabytes per square inch... The table from IBM[1] in the middle of the page says this number is in gigabits (not gigabytes) per square inch. This is obviously impressive nonetheless, but I wonder what else this article got wrong. [1] https://petapixel.com/assets/uploads/2020/12/ibmtale.jpg https://petapixel.com/assets/uploads/2020/12/ibmtale.jpg
bluepoint 6y ago
That is roughly 500 bits per square micrometer or 2000 square nanometers per bit or an average (assuming square lattice) distance of 50 nanometers per bit.
kazinator 6y ago
> record-breaking density of 317 gigabytes per square inch... Yawn on the raw density figure, though. The chip inside a 128 gigabyte micro SD card is a small fraction of a square inch and is cunning enough to provide random access. You just can't easily and cheaply have a long tape of them. It used to be the case once upon a time that mass storage media like magnetic tapes and discs based on writing on surfaces with a head had better density than memory chips.

by fernly 6y ago

daRealDodo 6y ago

> Data on the tape is stored at a record-breaking density of 317 gigabytes per square inch Me wondering about those micro SD cards that can store 1Tb.

VoxPelli 6y ago
It probably references the density within the data tape world, which is significant as there could be other ways to achieve a higher total storage, but this is one of the major components here it seems
luma 6y ago
Maybe around an order of magnitude more. The big difference is that square inch of tape might be 3-5 orders of magnitude cheaper to manufacture.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Widdershin 6y ago
Fair enough but chances are the tapes will have a much longer lifetime for storing data, which is the primary use case for this sort of thing.
reitzensteinm 6y ago
Those SD cards aren't close to a single layer, so it's not really equivalent. Ad absurdum, stacking two Micro SD cards on top of one another hasn't just doubled your density even though surface area is unchanged.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
adrian_b 6y ago
The density of flash memory is competitive with magnetic tapes, but the retention time is too low, making flash memory completely unusable for archival storage, even if it would have been as cheap as magnetic tape. In theory, write-once memory cards, using some kind of antifuses, could be designed to have a lifetime good enough for archival storage, but nobody has attempted to develop such a technology, because it is not clear if there would be a market for them. Most people do not think far ahead in the future, so they do not care much about archival data storage, until it is too late and the information had already been lost.
- Dylan16807 6y ago
  > The density of flash memory is competitive with magnetic tapes, but the retention time is too low, making flash memory completely unusable for archival storage, even if it would have been as cheap as magnetic tape. I disagree that it's unusable. You'd end up with a puck the size of a data tape that can archive a petabyte of data and needs to be plugged in to a 5 watt power supply for long term storage. That's not super onerous. Then consider that tapes need to be stored at exactly room temperature with 20-50 percent humidity, while this puck would barely care about environment at all. And you could plug it directly into a computer without a $5k drive. Honestly it sounds pretty good to me. We just need to drop the price of flash by a factor of 20 to make the scenario happen.

VoxPelli 6y ago

Loveliest part was the part right before that: “Just let me geek out for a second” Absolutely IBM storage person, the more geeking out the better!

samstave 6y ago
"Let me just surveillance out for a second" Guess where this will have the biggest impact in the next decade - the long term storage of billions of personally invading surveillance data points forever... Seriously, this tech will be abused. Against everyone. Facial recognition much? Zoom data? TikTok Data in a very compact physical form-factor? Utah and China will LOVE this!
- Synaesthesia 6y ago
  Data storage is already so cheap thanks to HDDs that a poor African country can afford to spy on its population. This will hardly change anything. If we want to do something about it we have to revolt in the streets.
  - ddingus 6y ago
    The tape may well be the better scenario. With a pile of random access devices, the time and cost of a single record retrieve is low, though the cost of bulk records can get high. All the oppressors need is a half decade window, maybe a decade to be pretty much golden, as far as totalitarianism goes. The tape will definitely hold the data, and then some apparently. But access costs go up. The drives seem to encourage indiscriminate targeting. Tapes would at least favor some priority. The smarter bears will use both! You are not wrong about what it will take.
    - cm2187 6y ago
      In a world where we hold people accountable for stupid things they did or said when they were teenagers, I can see a lot of blackmail value in retaining data for a much longer period of time.

ajnin 6y ago

> 15 km/h The tape stores 580TB for a length of 1255m, does that mean the read speed is 580TB/1255m*15km/h = 1.9TB/s ? Seems too high.

jeremyjh 6y ago
I'm guessing that is the fastest it can traverse the tape, it didn't say it could read at that speed.
- LeifCarrotson 6y ago
  > When tape is being read it is streamed over the head at a speed of about 15 km/h... It did say that. I wonder if there's some multi-track/double-layer/double-sided stuff going on that needs multiple passes to read, that does sound awful fast!
  - texse 6y ago
    Most recent tape standards have multiple "bands" and "wraps" placed in parallel. The head reads only one wrap at a time, so it takes many passes to read the whole tape. For example an LTO-8 tape has 52 wraps each within 4 bands, requiring 208 passes to read completely.
    - TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
      Why not just have multiple heads then?
      - nine_k 6y ago
        Positioning the tape should become harder, I suppose. Also, I suppose they limit the read bandwidth with something like what a single Infiniband connection would support; few disk arrays support much higher speeds.
      - paulmd 6y ago
        It would be like downloading a file using GetRight back in the day, where you'd have one thread downloading the 0-25% chunk, one downloading the 25-50% chunk, and so on. You could hypothetically do that, for sure, but the software basically is derived from the tape era where you'd just have one logical stream coming out of the tape.

dmix 6y ago

I inherently want to know how this works but I suck at physics and I’m just going to simply also stare in aw from the outside.

ddingus 6y ago

Absolutely. I had no idea tape was being pushed to these levels! Crazy good tech accomplishment right there. In a way, I am somehow comforted. Tape remaining relevant kind of dropped off my radar. Good to see. 317Gb / square inch AND 15km/h transport speed? That is nuts fast. Wonder how robust it really is? Of course at those densities and potential transfer rates there is ample room for error recovery.

paulmd 6y ago
It has never really entered the public consciousness since it's not a consumer-facing technology but tape development has continued apace. LTO-9 should be hitting the market very soon and supports up to 45TB per tape (compressed capacity, 18TB raw). Not quite sure where IBM's numbers here come from, their previous numbers don't match up to the progression of the LTO tape series' capacity. Maybe they are citing "research numbers" that they can do in a lab but aren't production-ready yet. I would certainly assume they are citing "compressed" data figured there. But certainly tape has continued to progress much faster than most people would have imagined. Big tape libraries are still a thing in certain environments and they work very well, there is no better solution for bulk cold storage.
- Dylan16807 6y ago
  > LTO-9 should be hitting the market very soon and supports up to 45TB per tape (compressed capacity, 18TB raw). LTO is cool and all but is the "compressed capacity" number really something to repeat with a straight face? The tape holds 18TB, we don't need to pretend it's anything else. > But certainly tape has continued to progress much faster than most people would have imagined. Mostly it has. But I'm somewhat worried about the future after the sudden late-game announcement that LTO-9 would have a 50% capacity improvement instead of the usual doubling.
  - jabl 6y ago
    > LTO is cool and all but is the "compressed capacity" number really something to repeat with a straight face? No, but it's been the standard in the tape industry for decades. Probably dates back to the first tape controllers that had builtin compression (so compression didn't tax the main cpu).

NiceWayToDoIT 6y ago

With that kind of precision I would like to know what kind of system they use to reduce outside mechanical vibrations?

guenthert 6y ago
It isn't mentioned and I don't expect much other then inertia of the device itself. There is a servo mechanism assuring the head follows the tracks on tape. Improvements on that are mentioned. I don't think it matters whether the tape (necessarily) or the environment vibrates or whether that distinction is meaningful.

0df8dkdf 6y ago

317 gb per square inch That seem perfectly reasonable. You can get 256 USB flash in in size about half square inch, and that is random access data. (e.g: https://www.walmart.com/ip/SAMSUNG-256GB-Bar-Plus-Titan-Gray-USB-Flash-Drive/454134260 https://www.walmart.com/ip/SAMSUNG-256GB-Bar-Plus-Titan-Gray... )

thamer 6y ago

> Data on the tape is stored at a record-breaking density of 317 gigabytes per square inch... The table from IBM[1] in the middle of the page says this number is in gigabits (not gigabytes) per square inch. This is obviously impressive nonetheless, but I wonder what else this article got wrong. [1] https://petapixel.com/assets/uploads/2020/12/ibmtale.jpg https://petapixel.com/assets/uploads/2020/12/ibmtale.jpg

bluepoint 6y ago

That is roughly 500 bits per square micrometer or 2000 square nanometers per bit or an average (assuming square lattice) distance of 50 nanometers per bit.

kazinator 6y ago

> record-breaking density of 317 gigabytes per square inch... Yawn on the raw density figure, though. The chip inside a 128 gigabyte micro SD card is a small fraction of a square inch and is cunning enough to provide random access. You just can't easily and cheaply have a long tape of them. It used to be the case once upon a time that mass storage media like magnetic tapes and discs based on writing on surfaces with a head had better density than memory chips.