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Transparently remapping good storage over bad storage to deal with faulty sectors is standard practice in hard disk drives and solid state drives. It was histor
by Veserv 3y ago
Transparently remapping good storage over bad storage to deal with faulty sectors is standard practice in hard disk drives and solid state drives. It was historically done in software, though these days it is largely done in the drive microcontrollers directly. Tape drives almost certainly use similar techniques.
- HankB99 3y agoWikipedia confirms that IBM introduced this in 1958. > Separate read/write heads providing transparent read-after-write verification.
- actionfromafar 3y agoThere's a general IBM theme of "whatever tech we come up with", IBM did it first, a very long time ago, they have their own name for it, and everyone else "discovers" it years or decades later.
- Karellen 3y ago> It was historically done in software, though these days it is largely done in the drive microcontrollers directly. It's still software on the drive microcontrollers, though. The only difference is it's software you can't see, reason about, upgrade, improve, or fix.
- RiverCrochet 3y agoIf a modern "one-shot" tape drive encounters an error during write, it will write the data again as the tape is moving. You lose a little bit of total capacity, but the data will still get written. This is why you always plan to write a little less than the full capacity of your tape. Newer LTOs may behave a little differently, I haven't kept up with newer stuff here.