HardOCP News
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- Dec 31, 1969
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I have no idea how we missed IBM's announcement of a 220TB storage tape the size of the palm of your hand. Holy cow!
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Great, but how do you FEED it that much data quickly enough for it to be useful?
Great, but how do you FEED it that much data quickly enough for it to be useful?
Tape is only good for analog audio recording. (and looped for delays)
To hell with tape for data. I don't care how much it can hold. Give me a second storage array and an offsite data-domain over this any day. Screw the cost.
It is designed for backups and recovery.
Tape is linear, and only in early computers from the 1980s on back was it ever used as primary data storage.
Really nice notion until you realize data storage is exploding. Think about police body cams. The data recorded per year for some cities could be in the petabyte range and may need to be stored for a minimum of 5 years. You really want a HDD array to store that in a cost effective way for tax payers...how cute.
Read/Write Speeds?
Read/Write Speeds?
You are correct, but... tape still sucks for data. At least as far as I'm concerned. I mean, I suppose it is a very cost effective way to back up a lot of data for disaster recovery only scenarios, but still... It's the very fact that it's linear, and typically very inflexible as far as retrieval goes that makes me say this.
It is impressive how much they can fit on a tape that size, but I'd still rather spend a ton of money on an off-site SAN for backup. Not practical in all cases I know, but...
Reduce that storage capacity by a factor 4 or 5 to represent real-world tape capacity (220 TB is the research lab capacity after all) and you still end up with 40+TB, a very useful amount for businesses.
You are correct, but... tape still sucks for data. At least as far as I'm concerned. I mean, I suppose it is a very cost effective way to back up a lot of data for disaster recovery only scenarios, but still... It's the very fact that it's linear, and typically very inflexible as far as retrieval goes that makes me say this.
It is impressive how much they can fit on a tape that size, but I'd still rather spend a ton of money on an off-site SAN for backup. Not practical in all cases I know, but...
Tape is only good for analog audio recording. (and looped for delays)
To hell with tape for data. I don't care how much it can hold. Give me a second storage array and an offsite data-domain over this any day. Screw the cost.
I haven't heard much about tape technology in recent years. I wonder how far they have gotten with the longevity of tape solutions. Used to be tape degraded pretty rapidly compared to optical disks. Even if it still degrades like that, 220Tb on a single tape ,makes it worthwhile for a lot of applications.
You are correct, but... tape still sucks for data. At least as far as I'm concerned. I mean, I suppose it is a very cost effective way to back up a lot of data for disaster recovery only scenarios, but still... It's the very fact that it's linear, and typically very inflexible as far as retrieval goes that makes me say this.
Archival life under normal climate controlled storage conditions for LTO-6 Barium Ferrite tapes is over 30 years. Your hard drive likely wouldn't even spin up after a decade of sitting idle. Your data on optical media would have been destroyed by rot of the organic layers.
For physical, on-site backup tape is best option by far.
Actually optical disks tend to degrade faster.
One of newest tapes currently in use is the LTO-6, and it's rated at 30 years.
Native capacity 2.5 TB and I usually see about double that per tape with compression.
Actually optical disks tend to degrade faster.
One of newest tapes currently in use is the LTO-6, and it's rated at 30 years.
Native capacity 2.5 TB and I usually see about double that per tape with compression.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon loaded with tapes.
Anyone know if big organizations (google, facebook, etc) are still using those room-sized robotic tape archives? I imagine they would want a robust corporate-wide backup on a regular basis and tape is still the way to go for massive archives.
Wow that is impressive!
I just wish tapes were not so expensive. When designing my home backup solution I was thinking it would be neat to use tapes, but they're more expensive than hard drives and a drive would require to remortgage the house. So I just use hard drives and a drive dock and it works ok but since hard drives arn't meant to be turned on/off all the time I find I get lot of failures. Pretty sure they can fail more easily from being dropped than a tape, too. Tapes are nice as they're reliable but damn, those prices.