[HN Gopher] Fujifilm Created a Magnetic Tape That Can Store 580 ...
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Fujifilm Created a Magnetic Tape That Can Store 580 Terabytes
Author : elorant
Score : 51 points
Date : 2020-12-28 21:44 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (petapixel.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (petapixel.com)
| anonu wrote:
| If the tape was twice as long, it could hold 1.16 petabytes. That
| would have been a more interesting headline.
| w0mbat wrote:
| My reaction was that any kind of tape can hold 580 Terabytes if
| it's long enough.
| dijit wrote:
| Great, so when can I buy one and how much will the tape drive
| cost?
|
| The largest issue with tape is that the drives themselves cost
| absurd amounts, and you better not cheap out because failure is
| both time consuming and scary.
|
| Swapping tapes continues to be human intensive and restore times
| long. But the tapes themselves are so cheap that at this scale it
| becomes worthwhile again.
| vondur wrote:
| This is geared for enterprise settings, not home use. I believe
| someone mentioned these drives costing $25,000. I do agree
| reasonably priced tape drives with TB of space for home users
| would be great.
| weare138 wrote:
| The prices are _much_ cheaper now. You can get a single tape
| drive for under $300 and enterprise grade single tape drives
| for under $3k.
|
| https://www.newegg.com/p/2BM-000A-000M5
|
| https://www.provantage.com/quantum-tc-l72an-br~7QUAT0JW.htm
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Doesn't really sound like it's aimed at you. Tape is for
| serious long-term, high-volume storage. If you've got a limited
| budget for the tape device it's probably not designed for you
| in the first place.
| GordonS wrote:
| Is it possible to buy tape drives in the 2nd hand market for a
| reasonable price?
| jariel wrote:
| We reached an inflection 'amazing!' point when we are able to put
| '100 songs in your pocket'. That was really a shocking thing
| given the limitations of CD/Tape etc..
|
| But the real inflection point may come when 'all relevant
| information in your local disk'. The tapes here in question can
| maybe store every book every written!
|
| We may be able to put the entirety of Wikipedia, every film, TV
| Show ever made, every book every lecture on a little disk.
|
| The only thing we'd need to access in realtime would be
| contemporary data like traffic flows, weather situation etc..
|
| The ability to store 'that much data quickly and easily' locally,
| may quite fundamentally change the equilibrium we have right now
| with the cloud and lead to a more natural decentralization.
|
| "All of YouTube from 2008 until the present, 99 cents at the
| local gas station, on usb-like contraption"
| Invictus0 wrote:
| The entire libgen archive is roughly 50 terabytes (most of the
| books ever written). It will be a very long time before we
| reach that level of storage in a phone.
| avdlinde wrote:
| Love that last line! Wonder what will happen drm wise in the
| future if we get to this point.
| jaynetics wrote:
| I love this thought, but have some doubts.
|
| So far, storage is still following something resembling Moores
| law, but it will probably hit physical limits way before a year
| of youtube (probably 30 of these new tapes or so) fits into
| your hand.
| webmobdev wrote:
| That's good. But when will it ever move out of the enterprise
| market?
|
| What I really want is an affordable Tape storage for us common
| folks / home users to archive data long term. It's really a pain
| to keep transferring your old backups every 2-5 years to a new CD
| / DVD / portable HDD. There is a market for home users that
| really don't want to put their data on the "cloud". And this
| generation is really creating so much data, some of which, I am
| sure they would like to store long-term.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Let's have someone invents a ultra high def head to repurpose
| all the old VCRs and VHS tapes :)
| devwastaken wrote:
| The solution is generally to not be doing full duplicative
| backups but to check hashes between already backed up files and
| new files, only backing up what you need.
|
| I don't recommend backing up to HDD's. They are prone to early
| failure from portable use because of vibration and drops.
|
| What we need are more affordable sata SSD's. Currently nvme
| SSD's are very close to the same price.
|
| If you could sell a 1TB portable usb 3/usb c backup device that
| comes with good software the vast majority of people would be
| set.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| I store on an external HD, and every year I buy a new HD and
| copy across to it and verify checksums against my records.
| Costs basically zero and low-effort. What am I missing?
| jjulius wrote:
| >... every year I buy a new HD...
|
| OK, but OP said:
|
| >It's really a pain to keep transferring your old backups
| every 2-5 years...
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Because they're considering options like DVDs.
|
| With a new HD you can just copy it across in one step.
| jjulius wrote:
| OP explicitly mentioned HDDs in their post; they do not
| want to be transferring data to a new HDD every year, or
| two years, or five years.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Well that's why I asked what I'm missing! It's just one
| command to copy from an old HD to the new HD? Takes me
| all of 30 mins once a year.
| pizza234 wrote:
| The OP is mixing mediums with different characteristics.
| The DVD has a fixed size (say, 5.x GB), while hard disks
| are relatively open-ended. One can buy 10+ TB magnetic
| disks for a cheap price (less than 200$).
|
| If the OP really needs dozens of TBs of capacity every few
| year, they definitely don't fit in the home user market
| they are talking about.
| weare138 wrote:
| Low cost, high density and a low failure rate compared to
| HDs. That's why it's still used in the enterprise for backup
| solutions.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| I don't think these are home-use concerns.
| Tokkemon wrote:
| Normal people don't know what a checksum is.... or they think
| that's the amount their paid every week from the bank.
| sgt wrote:
| Every year you buy a new HD and yet the cost is basically
| zero?
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Yeah what does a new HD cost? Like PS100 max for a big high
| quality one? Compared to buying a PS5k tape drive and
| expensive tapes... yeah that's basically zero.
| jjulius wrote:
| $100 is definitely not "basically zero". Not only that,
| but a $5k tape drive and tapes are designed to last a
| significantly longer period of time, essentially bringing
| the cost of long-term storage closer to $0/year than your
| option of spending $100/year.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| It's 50 years before $100/year catches up with a one-time
| cost of $5k. On top of that, the total capacity of the
| mediumgoes up steadily over time, while you will need to
| drop another $5k every 10 years or so _or_ span your
| backups across multiple tapes.
| stratosgear wrote:
| 5k amortized at 100/year is 50 years to get your money's
| worth. It seems 100/year is a much better deal. I don't
| see your math working out...
| centimeter wrote:
| Why do you do this manual checksumming thing instead of e.g.
| setting up a ZFS mirror once every n years?
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Because simple and manually inspectable is better for
| backups.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Last I looked into this, if you had a lot of data to back up (Say
| 1 Gbyte per second, continuous, with a retention time of 1 year),
| it was still far cheaper to simply use hard drives. One employee
| can keep up with all drive replacements, hardware setup, etc with
| time to spare. Drives aren't super power hungry, so any old
| office building is suitable. Encrypt the drive contents on
| another site so you don't need 24/7 security. Total system cost
| was sub $1M with a running cost of $500k/year and storage of
| 50PB. Bargain.
|
| Now that GDPR applies, most companies need to rewrite backups
| every 30 days anyway to remove data where a GDPR deletion request
| applies. That tips the scale further in the direction of always
| spinning hard drives. Just hook up 64 drives to each machine,
| make sure you only do streaming writes of 1Gb+ files, do some ZFS
| raid-like scheme, and away you go.
| pestaa wrote:
| IANAL but you do not need to rewrite backups to brute force
| compliance. You need to inform your customers what your
| retention policy is though. I've seen large enterprises
| communicating backup lifetime up to 6 months after a deletion
| request.
| jeffbee wrote:
| That didn't add up. 1GB per second for a month is 2.6PB. Do you
| have a source of 40TB disk drives?
| londons_explore wrote:
| 1GB/second for a year... Plus spare drives for redundancy,
| hotspotting, a test/training setup, and unplanned for
| increases in storage requirements.
| kaslai wrote:
| "to each machine" implies that there's more than one machine
| with 64 drives attached.
| Znafon wrote:
| You don't have to do it this way, you can just use encryption
| at rest with a different key for each user and throw the key
| when a user ask for deletion of their data. No need to get all
| the backup back to scrub them one by one.
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