8 ms·

Sony develops new 185 TB storage tape

65 points by mootothemax 12y ago

post_break 12y ago
I'd love to have this. Just like I'd love to have 3 layer bluray discs but that's a pipe dream. Consumer back up mediums are still in the stone age besides hard drives.
- minikites 12y ago
  Is there any technical reason tape backup is so expensive and out of reach for consumers?
  - vinceguidry 12y ago
    Probably because the consumer market really has no need for the raison d'etre of tape backup's very existence, seriously gigantic capacity. If you don't need that, tapes are a pain in the ass and external drives work much better.
  - ghshephard 12y ago
    Yes. Tapes have a property (Linear Access, Slow random access) that make them useful only for backups/archiving. Business only need to buy very few for their server rooms (if that, many business are backing up to the cloud now) - so, super low volume of drives means that the cost of the R&D and manufacturing plant needs to be made up in increased costs per unit. An LTO-6 drive goes for about $2700, and can store 2.5TB/Tape - The tapes themselves are around $90 each. Most consumers would just go buy a 2 TB drive for two at a couple hundred dollars each. They have zero need or requirement for tapes.
    - hga 12y ago
      On the other hand, it doesn't make sense for "consumers" to chase the latest and greatest tape technology, for which there's always a price premium. Plus there's no single disk drive that's fast enough to feed a LTO-5 drive, which I'm sure extends to LTO-6. (Note, each generation of LTO drives will write one generation back and read two generations back.) The latter wasn't available when I set my current home system (the limits of local disk back where firmly confirmed by this: http://www.ancell-ent.com/1715_Rex_Ave_127B_Joplin/images/ http://www.ancell-ent.com/1715_Rex_Ave_127B_Joplin/images/), but LTO-4, which will hold 800 GB per tape before compression and which while perhaps obsolescent is still widely used (hits some nice price performance points), was and I think still is quite feasible, albeit costly. But then again, how much is your data and piece of mind worth to you? HP 1760 drive is on the the slow end, but that's fine for consumers with much less severe time to backup and time to restore requirements. Newegg price is a bit above $2K, with some serious bargain shopping you should be able to get one for substantially less. Add at least one SAS adapter (I use two), I like the LSI 9211 line, and a -4i (4 internal ports, BTW, they work with SATA drives as well), current Newegg price $163, and a fast but small SAS drive for buffering, say a Seagate Cheetah or Savvio 15K drive of 146 or 300 GB size, Newegg has an anomalously priced Cheetah 300 GB at $168 right now, call it $200 plus or minus, and then of course media. There you want to get serious about bargain hunting and bulk buying (5-20 tapes at a time), but Newegg's single quantity pricing for Fujifilm or HP tapes is $40 plus or minus 2, and fairly easy bargain shopping I just did on Amazon to buy a few tape found HP tapes at $24-25 each from high reputation merchants. dragontamer at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7699179 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7699179 says LTO-5 tape is going for $25 each, which would match my experience with LTO-3 tapes costing about the same as LTO-4 when got my drive; I just use 9 tapes for Bacula incrementals and differentials for a while, then move them to the full pool.
      - dragontamer 12y ago
        If you're gonna modernize that setup, I'll have to say that a cheap SSD for buffering will negate any future issues. Cheap PCIe SSDs are almost here (the cheap PCIe Sandforce controller chip was just released... consumer-ready PCIe SSDs ought to be around in just a couple of years). Its possible to max out the 6GBps channel (ie: 480MB/s) with say... a $90 120GB Vertex-3. (http://www.amazon.com/OCZ-Vertex-2-5-Inch-Performance-VTX3-25SAT3-120G/dp/B004Q81CKY http://www.amazon.com/OCZ-Vertex-2-5-Inch-Performance-VTX3-2...). The M.2 SSDs and PCIe SSDs are faster of course, which is why Consumer PCIe SSDs are getting pushed out by LSI and others. There isn't much point to faster SSDs when you're limited by the 6Gbps SATA port. For example: $300 for the 240GB Plextor M6e, with read speeds measured at ~667 MB/s: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820249043 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820249... So SSDs are actually both cheaper, and more performant than a 15k SAS buffering drive!
        hga 12y ago
        Modern NAND based SSDs wear out, their individual cells can be rewritten only so many time. So a big drive even with a smallish buffer is a consumable, although maybe the numbers work out now. They didn't ~3 years ago when I set up my current system.
        dragontamer 12y ago
        http://techreport.com/review/26058/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-data-retention-after-600tb http://techreport.com/review/26058/the-ssd-endurance-experim... The TLC SSD (3-bits per cell) is showing minor issues after 600TB of writing, but is still a usable drive. The MLC (2-bits per cell) SSDs have shown no issues after 600TB. In comparison, a tape-drive would have long-past its ~200 end-to-end reads rating. MLC SSDs wear out slower than a tape drive! (Please don't take this sentence too seriously. I know I'm using hyperbole) The SSDs I've linked to are MLC (2-bits per cell) designs, and can be expected to have roughly the same endurance as the MLC SSDs that techreport is testing. By far the most telling takeaway thus far is the fact that all the drives have endured 600TB of writes without dying. That's an awful lot of data—well over 300GB per day for five years—and far more than typical PC users are ever likely to write to their drives. Besides, the backing storage is Tape. You're only using the SSD as a temporary stop so that your writes can be buffered out all at once. Using an SSD as a caching option has been extensively tested! Its safe to use for this sort of thing.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - dragontamer 12y ago
    The true cost of tape is that of the tape drive. Tapes themselves are pretty darn cheap. LTO-5 tapes cost $25 for 1.5TB (uncompressed). Multi-layer Blu-Ray is the only solution that is anywhere close to that cheap... but those are a pain-in-the-ass to use. (You'll need Thirty 50GB Blu-Rays to do the job of a single LTO-5 tape) Also consider: At x8, BluRays are written at 36 MB/s. Tape Drives are read/written to at 140MB/s, making them much faster than BluRays. The problem is that tape drives cost roughly $2000 each. So tapes only become economical when you're storing 25+ TB of data.
    - hga 12y ago
      The other problem is that to prevent "shoe shining", you need a fast storage system to feed the tape drive. The somewhat slow LTO-4 HP 1760 I use has a sustained compressed (on the tape drive) speed of 160 MB/s, their a few hundred dollars more LTO-5 tape drive require 280 MB/s ... and apparently have two SAS ports. I can get by just fine with one Seagate 15K drive on another PCI-e card buffering the former, I think you'd need something more intense for LTO-5, I've read that no single hard drive can keep up with LTO-5 drives.
      - dragontamer 12y ago
        For people who are used to ~20MB/s (maximum) off of x4 speed 50GB BluRay drives, I think the problem you note is a "first world problem"... a problem many people would be happy to have. On no! My Tape Drives are written too fast that they're causing me issues :-). If only my hard drives were fast enough to keep the write buffer full!
        hga 12y ago
        I suppose so in some ways, but shoe shining will prematurely wear out your LTO tapes and drives. The L in LTO is for linear: when the tape writes its traveling at over 100 inches per second. Compare to helical scan tape systems like VHS and DAT/DDS where the tape heads are moving very quickly past the tape but the tape itself is not really fast at all. So if the write buffer empties, the drive has to decelerate the tape, wind it back quickly, then accelerate it so it's at full speed when it's at the location to write a new block. I might recommend DDS for the 3rd World ^_^. It's what I used until it fell too far behind hard disk sizes.
- jotm 12y ago
  How much do you need to backup? A few hard drives can take care of most consumer needs, and per GB they're very cheap, no reason to use tape imo...
  - post_break 12y ago
    Ever need to backup a terabyte of data on a bluray? How about 500GB? It's impossible at 25GB a disc.
    - mikeash 12y ago
      BDXL can give you 100GB per disc, so that's better, but still a gigantic pain in the ass for modern HD. The discs are pretty crazy expensive too, looks like.
      - post_break 12y ago
        Exactly my point. BDXL is a pipe dream for consumers.
    - Nelson69 12y ago
      Not impossible but it's a pain in the ass. The current state of backup software is atrocious for such a task too.
- bitJericho 12y ago
  Blurays holding 30gb is overkill for most consumers, but is available and cheap. Usually a DVD does it for my family members requesting a backup. I personally just keep around a couple drives and backup one to the other.
  - mikeash 12y ago
    I'm surprised. It's pretty easy to rack up 8.5GB of data these days with ubiquitous smartphone cameras and such. I wouldn't expect even casual users to be able to fit into that much space anymore.
    - bitJericho 12y ago
      I don't know what the average consumer racks up, but 180TB? Not in this lifetime :D A relative of mine recently needed 3 dvds to backups absolutely everything. She tends to delete what she doesn't want to keep though. Me personally, I have a few hundred gigs I'd like to never lose... 3 or 4 consumer grade blu-ray discs should do it...
xhrpost 12y ago
I remember reading articles about 400GB optical discs being designed back in 2001. Still waiting.
- RogerL 12y ago
  If you didn't happen to read the article, that is being worked on: "Sony is also working on more consumer-friendly storage - in March it announced it was working with Panasonic on the Archival Disc, which will hold 1TB of data, the equivalent of 250 DVD films"
  - xhrpost 12y ago
    My point is that these announcements tend not to mean much to consumers until it actually happens. If it does. Sorry to be a downer, it's just kind of disappointing. My first PC from '95 had an optical drive capable of holding more data than the hard drive. Right now, you have 2.5TB tape, you will likely not see a jump to this but rather 2.5 to 5 to 10, etc. all the way until 185TB fits the graph.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
    - venomsnake 12y ago
      Well they would not need the cloud otherwise. The cloud concept was created and pushed relentlessly by the IT giants and never responded to popular demand. AWS being the only exception probably. /Drops tin foil hat.
      - aaronem 12y ago
        > never responded to popular demand Really? I know lots of folks, within the industry and without, who use cloud backup services like Carbonite and Crashplan precisely because they are so much more convenient than maintaining a physical backup scheme, however simple. I veer in the other direction, because I trust USB HDDs in my physical possession more than I trust Crashplan or Carbonite not to screw up, but the argument from convenience is not an unreasonable one, and I'd say it certainly does count as the cloud "respond[ing] to popular demand".
tenfingers 12y ago
This would make tape worthwhile again if the price is reasonable (<= 100$ cassette). Currently LTO-6 2.5TB tapes are just useless. Whereas they are generally more reliable than an hard drive, for the same investment you can just buy more drives and make up for it, and you gain improved r/w speed and _random_ access, which cannot be overstated (tape is generally a PITA to use). Not to mention that a single tape drive is only useful if you can backup your entire system with just one tape. When LTO6 came out, I already couldn't, making a tape robot necessary. Again, to make things into perspective, today you can just buy a cheap nas with 2 drives with hotplug, and you still saved 2k$ for the tape drive. With a 185TB tape you can seriously think to backup an entire site to a couple of cassettes again. IF price is reasonable.
- shiftpgdn 12y ago
  Just about every big organization on the face of the planet does backup to tape as part of a disaster recovery scheme. Anecdotally I currently backup about 100TB of data each month that get shipped off to a secure storage facility. I would love to be able to back up to HDDs/NAS and ship that out but the equipment cost is much higher and hard drives are not reliable for long term storage as the heads stick to the platters.
  - greedo 12y ago
    Or they backup to a disk appliance that replicates deduped data across a WAN segment to a DR site...
- valarauca1 12y ago
  >LTO-6 2.5TB tapes are just useless. Not at all. Oracle and IBM sell data insurance. If you save data on their tapes, that data will be their for 100 years, or you get a large chunk of money. This is why corporations still use tapes, HDD's don't offer such protections. Sony currently doesn't offer tape insurance. Which if they want this to succeed they likely will have too as this is the main attraction of tapes. Safe long term storage. :.:.: There are a few technical problems. The biggest problem overall is write speed. A T1000C tape drive (5TB Oracle) can take about 4 hours to "Fill". This is with 16 parallel writes (tracks) taking place. Having a flat 20x more data to write could mean times in the order of 72+ hour to preform a full back up (Assume 16 parallel writes, same speed as oracle), or LONGER! I really want to see a data sheet on this new tech not hype.
tomswartz07 12y ago
I wonder if these cassettes are susceptible to 'stretching' that pained older cassette storage media. As the tape began to wear out, it would 'stretch' and subtly change the frequency of the data stored on it, causing issues. Anyone have any further details on this?
- dragontamer 12y ago
  The experimental tape Sony has probably ignores this issue. Tape drives are rated for how many times they can be written / read to from end-to-end. LTO drives are rated for 200+ end-to-end reads. So an LTO6 tape (2.5TB) has to have 500TB of data read / written to it before it wears out.
- robomartin 12y ago
  A properly engineered tape format will have, for lack of a better name, an "index" or synchronisation bit or signal recorded alongside the data tracks. Back in the days of videotape there was something called "control track" that served a similar purpose. In the video case it was used mostly to ensure the video being read off tape ran as close as possible to the required video standard frequency. Smaller mechanical variations where then removed electronically using a FIFO often called "time base corrector". Similar approaches can (and should) be used for data tapes in order to ensure data integrity in the face of tape stretch, etc. The other approach is to encode the data using a self clocking encoder, in which case data recovery is pretty much guaranteed at any speed so long as the data read frequency is within the read circuitry VCO's capture range. These approaches are not mutually exclusive. I think there have been hybrid optical/magnetic approches also but I am not familiar with them.
  - hga 12y ago
    As a concrete example, you are warned not to use a bulk eraser on LTO tapes because they have servo tracks that will also get erased. In the bad old days there were multi-platter disk drives that used e.g. the bottom surface for a servo track.
jareds 12y ago
Was tape ever widely used by consumers? I remember my father buying a tape drive about the time Windows 95 came out and using it to back up the family PC. Was this a common thing at that time or was it just the fact that he was a computer teacher and technically inclined?
- heartbreak 12y ago
  I remember my father backing up the accounting data of the family business to tape at the end of each month. He did that for several years before eventually replacing the tapes with flash drives.
- mbreese 12y ago
  About the same time, I had a tape drive for the same purpose. It wasn't used much, but was a nice backup. At the time, it was the only cost effective way to backup a PC. Now, drives and cloud storage are cheap enough that tape inly has an advantage when storing/backing up "really big data". My old university has a large distributed tape system for long term storage on the hundreds of petabytes scale.
- Avshalom 12y ago
  Not proper tape but the zx spectrum used consumer cassette tapes. Before my time but I've heard some radio shows.used to broadcast programs and a couple albums came with programs as a track
r00fus 12y ago
Combined with the new Sandisk 4GB SAS SSD (with 6 and 8TB models to be announced soon), I wonder what impacts this will have on exa-scale data storage.
- toomuchtodo 12y ago
  Typo; think you meant 4TB
mentos 12y ago
Interesting that you can now hand someone the entire contents of iTunes on a cassette. I wonder how long it'll be until a flash drive can hold this much data? I can usually find any song I want to listen to on youtube, but I think it'd be interesting to just have every song locally.

65 points by mootothemax 12y ago

I'd love to have this. Just like I'd love to have 3 layer bluray discs but that's a pipe dream. Consumer back up mediums are still in the stone age besides hard drives.

minikites 12y ago
Is there any technical reason tape backup is so expensive and out of reach for consumers?
- vinceguidry 12y ago
  Probably because the consumer market really has no need for the raison d'etre of tape backup's very existence, seriously gigantic capacity. If you don't need that, tapes are a pain in the ass and external drives work much better.
- ghshephard 12y ago
  Yes. Tapes have a property (Linear Access, Slow random access) that make them useful only for backups/archiving. Business only need to buy very few for their server rooms (if that, many business are backing up to the cloud now) - so, super low volume of drives means that the cost of the R&D and manufacturing plant needs to be made up in increased costs per unit. An LTO-6 drive goes for about $2700, and can store 2.5TB/Tape - The tapes themselves are around $90 each. Most consumers would just go buy a 2 TB drive for two at a couple hundred dollars each. They have zero need or requirement for tapes.
  - hga 12y ago
    On the other hand, it doesn't make sense for "consumers" to chase the latest and greatest tape technology, for which there's always a price premium. Plus there's no single disk drive that's fast enough to feed a LTO-5 drive, which I'm sure extends to LTO-6. (Note, each generation of LTO drives will write one generation back and read two generations back.) The latter wasn't available when I set my current home system (the limits of local disk back where firmly confirmed by this: http://www.ancell-ent.com/1715_Rex_Ave_127B_Joplin/images/ http://www.ancell-ent.com/1715_Rex_Ave_127B_Joplin/images/), but LTO-4, which will hold 800 GB per tape before compression and which while perhaps obsolescent is still widely used (hits some nice price performance points), was and I think still is quite feasible, albeit costly. But then again, how much is your data and piece of mind worth to you? HP 1760 drive is on the the slow end, but that's fine for consumers with much less severe time to backup and time to restore requirements. Newegg price is a bit above $2K, with some serious bargain shopping you should be able to get one for substantially less. Add at least one SAS adapter (I use two), I like the LSI 9211 line, and a -4i (4 internal ports, BTW, they work with SATA drives as well), current Newegg price $163, and a fast but small SAS drive for buffering, say a Seagate Cheetah or Savvio 15K drive of 146 or 300 GB size, Newegg has an anomalously priced Cheetah 300 GB at $168 right now, call it $200 plus or minus, and then of course media. There you want to get serious about bargain hunting and bulk buying (5-20 tapes at a time), but Newegg's single quantity pricing for Fujifilm or HP tapes is $40 plus or minus 2, and fairly easy bargain shopping I just did on Amazon to buy a few tape found HP tapes at $24-25 each from high reputation merchants. dragontamer at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7699179 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7699179 says LTO-5 tape is going for $25 each, which would match my experience with LTO-3 tapes costing about the same as LTO-4 when got my drive; I just use 9 tapes for Bacula incrementals and differentials for a while, then move them to the full pool.
    - dragontamer 12y ago
      If you're gonna modernize that setup, I'll have to say that a cheap SSD for buffering will negate any future issues. Cheap PCIe SSDs are almost here (the cheap PCIe Sandforce controller chip was just released... consumer-ready PCIe SSDs ought to be around in just a couple of years). Its possible to max out the 6GBps channel (ie: 480MB/s) with say... a $90 120GB Vertex-3. (http://www.amazon.com/OCZ-Vertex-2-5-Inch-Performance-VTX3-25SAT3-120G/dp/B004Q81CKY http://www.amazon.com/OCZ-Vertex-2-5-Inch-Performance-VTX3-2...). The M.2 SSDs and PCIe SSDs are faster of course, which is why Consumer PCIe SSDs are getting pushed out by LSI and others. There isn't much point to faster SSDs when you're limited by the 6Gbps SATA port. For example: $300 for the 240GB Plextor M6e, with read speeds measured at ~667 MB/s: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820249043 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820249... So SSDs are actually both cheaper, and more performant than a 15k SAS buffering drive!
      - hga 12y ago
        Modern NAND based SSDs wear out, their individual cells can be rewritten only so many time. So a big drive even with a smallish buffer is a consumable, although maybe the numbers work out now. They didn't ~3 years ago when I set up my current system.
        dragontamer 12y ago
        http://techreport.com/review/26058/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-data-retention-after-600tb http://techreport.com/review/26058/the-ssd-endurance-experim... The TLC SSD (3-bits per cell) is showing minor issues after 600TB of writing, but is still a usable drive. The MLC (2-bits per cell) SSDs have shown no issues after 600TB. In comparison, a tape-drive would have long-past its ~200 end-to-end reads rating. MLC SSDs wear out slower than a tape drive! (Please don't take this sentence too seriously. I know I'm using hyperbole) The SSDs I've linked to are MLC (2-bits per cell) designs, and can be expected to have roughly the same endurance as the MLC SSDs that techreport is testing. By far the most telling takeaway thus far is the fact that all the drives have endured 600TB of writes without dying. That's an awful lot of data—well over 300GB per day for five years—and far more than typical PC users are ever likely to write to their drives. Besides, the backing storage is Tape. You're only using the SSD as a temporary stop so that your writes can be buffered out all at once. Using an SSD as a caching option has been extensively tested! Its safe to use for this sort of thing.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- dragontamer 12y ago
  The true cost of tape is that of the tape drive. Tapes themselves are pretty darn cheap. LTO-5 tapes cost $25 for 1.5TB (uncompressed). Multi-layer Blu-Ray is the only solution that is anywhere close to that cheap... but those are a pain-in-the-ass to use. (You'll need Thirty 50GB Blu-Rays to do the job of a single LTO-5 tape) Also consider: At x8, BluRays are written at 36 MB/s. Tape Drives are read/written to at 140MB/s, making them much faster than BluRays. The problem is that tape drives cost roughly $2000 each. So tapes only become economical when you're storing 25+ TB of data.
  - hga 12y ago
    The other problem is that to prevent "shoe shining", you need a fast storage system to feed the tape drive. The somewhat slow LTO-4 HP 1760 I use has a sustained compressed (on the tape drive) speed of 160 MB/s, their a few hundred dollars more LTO-5 tape drive require 280 MB/s ... and apparently have two SAS ports. I can get by just fine with one Seagate 15K drive on another PCI-e card buffering the former, I think you'd need something more intense for LTO-5, I've read that no single hard drive can keep up with LTO-5 drives.
    - dragontamer 12y ago
      For people who are used to ~20MB/s (maximum) off of x4 speed 50GB BluRay drives, I think the problem you note is a "first world problem"... a problem many people would be happy to have. On no! My Tape Drives are written too fast that they're causing me issues :-). If only my hard drives were fast enough to keep the write buffer full!
      - hga 12y ago
        I suppose so in some ways, but shoe shining will prematurely wear out your LTO tapes and drives. The L in LTO is for linear: when the tape writes its traveling at over 100 inches per second. Compare to helical scan tape systems like VHS and DAT/DDS where the tape heads are moving very quickly past the tape but the tape itself is not really fast at all. So if the write buffer empties, the drive has to decelerate the tape, wind it back quickly, then accelerate it so it's at full speed when it's at the location to write a new block. I might recommend DDS for the 3rd World ^_^. It's what I used until it fell too far behind hard disk sizes.
jotm 12y ago
How much do you need to backup? A few hard drives can take care of most consumer needs, and per GB they're very cheap, no reason to use tape imo...
- post_break 12y ago
  Ever need to backup a terabyte of data on a bluray? How about 500GB? It's impossible at 25GB a disc.
  - mikeash 12y ago
    BDXL can give you 100GB per disc, so that's better, but still a gigantic pain in the ass for modern HD. The discs are pretty crazy expensive too, looks like.
    - post_break 12y ago
      Exactly my point. BDXL is a pipe dream for consumers.
  - Nelson69 12y ago
    Not impossible but it's a pain in the ass. The current state of backup software is atrocious for such a task too.
bitJericho 12y ago
Blurays holding 30gb is overkill for most consumers, but is available and cheap. Usually a DVD does it for my family members requesting a backup. I personally just keep around a couple drives and backup one to the other.
- mikeash 12y ago
  I'm surprised. It's pretty easy to rack up 8.5GB of data these days with ubiquitous smartphone cameras and such. I wouldn't expect even casual users to be able to fit into that much space anymore.
  - bitJericho 12y ago
    I don't know what the average consumer racks up, but 180TB? Not in this lifetime :D A relative of mine recently needed 3 dvds to backups absolutely everything. She tends to delete what she doesn't want to keep though. Me personally, I have a few hundred gigs I'd like to never lose... 3 or 4 consumer grade blu-ray discs should do it...

xhrpost 12y ago

I remember reading articles about 400GB optical discs being designed back in 2001. Still waiting.

RogerL 12y ago
If you didn't happen to read the article, that is being worked on: "Sony is also working on more consumer-friendly storage - in March it announced it was working with Panasonic on the Archival Disc, which will hold 1TB of data, the equivalent of 250 DVD films"
- xhrpost 12y ago
  My point is that these announcements tend not to mean much to consumers until it actually happens. If it does. Sorry to be a downer, it's just kind of disappointing. My first PC from '95 had an optical drive capable of holding more data than the hard drive. Right now, you have 2.5TB tape, you will likely not see a jump to this but rather 2.5 to 5 to 10, etc. all the way until 185TB fits the graph.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
  - venomsnake 12y ago
    Well they would not need the cloud otherwise. The cloud concept was created and pushed relentlessly by the IT giants and never responded to popular demand. AWS being the only exception probably. /Drops tin foil hat.
    - aaronem 12y ago
      > never responded to popular demand Really? I know lots of folks, within the industry and without, who use cloud backup services like Carbonite and Crashplan precisely because they are so much more convenient than maintaining a physical backup scheme, however simple. I veer in the other direction, because I trust USB HDDs in my physical possession more than I trust Crashplan or Carbonite not to screw up, but the argument from convenience is not an unreasonable one, and I'd say it certainly does count as the cloud "respond[ing] to popular demand".

tenfingers 12y ago

This would make tape worthwhile again if the price is reasonable (<= 100$ cassette). Currently LTO-6 2.5TB tapes are just useless. Whereas they are generally more reliable than an hard drive, for the same investment you can just buy more drives and make up for it, and you gain improved r/w speed and _random_ access, which cannot be overstated (tape is generally a PITA to use). Not to mention that a single tape drive is only useful if you can backup your entire system with just one tape. When LTO6 came out, I already couldn't, making a tape robot necessary. Again, to make things into perspective, today you can just buy a cheap nas with 2 drives with hotplug, and you still saved 2k$ for the tape drive. With a 185TB tape you can seriously think to backup an entire site to a couple of cassettes again. IF price is reasonable.

shiftpgdn 12y ago
Just about every big organization on the face of the planet does backup to tape as part of a disaster recovery scheme. Anecdotally I currently backup about 100TB of data each month that get shipped off to a secure storage facility. I would love to be able to back up to HDDs/NAS and ship that out but the equipment cost is much higher and hard drives are not reliable for long term storage as the heads stick to the platters.
- greedo 12y ago
  Or they backup to a disk appliance that replicates deduped data across a WAN segment to a DR site...
valarauca1 12y ago
>LTO-6 2.5TB tapes are just useless. Not at all. Oracle and IBM sell data insurance. If you save data on their tapes, that data will be their for 100 years, or you get a large chunk of money. This is why corporations still use tapes, HDD's don't offer such protections. Sony currently doesn't offer tape insurance. Which if they want this to succeed they likely will have too as this is the main attraction of tapes. Safe long term storage. :.:.: There are a few technical problems. The biggest problem overall is write speed. A T1000C tape drive (5TB Oracle) can take about 4 hours to "Fill". This is with 16 parallel writes (tracks) taking place. Having a flat 20x more data to write could mean times in the order of 72+ hour to preform a full back up (Assume 16 parallel writes, same speed as oracle), or LONGER! I really want to see a data sheet on this new tech not hype.

tomswartz07 12y ago

I wonder if these cassettes are susceptible to 'stretching' that pained older cassette storage media. As the tape began to wear out, it would 'stretch' and subtly change the frequency of the data stored on it, causing issues. Anyone have any further details on this?

dragontamer 12y ago
The experimental tape Sony has probably ignores this issue. Tape drives are rated for how many times they can be written / read to from end-to-end. LTO drives are rated for 200+ end-to-end reads. So an LTO6 tape (2.5TB) has to have 500TB of data read / written to it before it wears out.
robomartin 12y ago
A properly engineered tape format will have, for lack of a better name, an "index" or synchronisation bit or signal recorded alongside the data tracks. Back in the days of videotape there was something called "control track" that served a similar purpose. In the video case it was used mostly to ensure the video being read off tape ran as close as possible to the required video standard frequency. Smaller mechanical variations where then removed electronically using a FIFO often called "time base corrector". Similar approaches can (and should) be used for data tapes in order to ensure data integrity in the face of tape stretch, etc. The other approach is to encode the data using a self clocking encoder, in which case data recovery is pretty much guaranteed at any speed so long as the data read frequency is within the read circuitry VCO's capture range. These approaches are not mutually exclusive. I think there have been hybrid optical/magnetic approches also but I am not familiar with them.
- hga 12y ago
  As a concrete example, you are warned not to use a bulk eraser on LTO tapes because they have servo tracks that will also get erased. In the bad old days there were multi-platter disk drives that used e.g. the bottom surface for a servo track.

jareds 12y ago

Was tape ever widely used by consumers? I remember my father buying a tape drive about the time Windows 95 came out and using it to back up the family PC. Was this a common thing at that time or was it just the fact that he was a computer teacher and technically inclined?

heartbreak 12y ago
I remember my father backing up the accounting data of the family business to tape at the end of each month. He did that for several years before eventually replacing the tapes with flash drives.
mbreese 12y ago
About the same time, I had a tape drive for the same purpose. It wasn't used much, but was a nice backup. At the time, it was the only cost effective way to backup a PC. Now, drives and cloud storage are cheap enough that tape inly has an advantage when storing/backing up "really big data". My old university has a large distributed tape system for long term storage on the hundreds of petabytes scale.
Avshalom 12y ago
Not proper tape but the zx spectrum used consumer cassette tapes. Before my time but I've heard some radio shows.used to broadcast programs and a couple albums came with programs as a track

r00fus 12y ago

Combined with the new Sandisk 4GB SAS SSD (with 6 and 8TB models to be announced soon), I wonder what impacts this will have on exa-scale data storage.

toomuchtodo 12y ago
Typo; think you meant 4TB

mentos 12y ago

Interesting that you can now hand someone the entire contents of iTunes on a cassette. I wonder how long it'll be until a flash drive can hold this much data? I can usually find any song I want to listen to on youtube, but I think it'd be interesting to just have every song locally.