Why the Future of Data Storage is Magnetic Tape

for seriously long term archiving I suppose but obviously this is never going to make its way to the end user so it doesn't mean shit for us really.

We've started with red and moved on to UV, the next logical steps for optical media are X-rays and gamma rays, which I don't think would happen

> not liking .tar
> not going to make it

>stick your hand into the reader
>get cancer

But all backups need to be stored properly. Optical media can be destoryed by stray photons.

Isn't this obvious to most people? Just cos people don't encounter it in their daily lives (as cloud providers and big business have the people and facilities to do it for them) doesn't mean it not important (like nuclear submarines for example).

I think OP is talking about for industual scale backup.

I think individuals are propbably better of with dvd-rs to store their mp3s and porn tho as tape needs proper processes in place. How many people do you know with 200 terabytes of porn?

I wonder if digital optical tape could be a thing? using currently concievable technology, how much data could be optically stored on a tape with the same area as a roll of 35mm film? and for a magnetic tape with the same area?

Holotapes? Enough to store hours of HD 3D porn

>tape will be the backup format of choice for the future
It's already the backup format choice of the present. Google is one of the the world's largest buyers of magnetic tapes.

How many hours would you say?

Hard to say, last time I was interested in that topic years ago it was mindblowing amount

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_Versatile_Disc

these discs store 6TB per disc, if tapes can be better than it means maaany

as it stands, tapes and the tape readers are hilariously expensive and only affordable by big labs, hence you mostly see them used by CERN or NASA

once we figure out proper 3D NAND, flash storage will take over everything in the world

> Storage capacity 1 000 000 000 MB
> Medium transfer rate: 300 Mbit/s or 37.5 MB/s

Estimated time to fill a hyper-cd: about 50 years. Totally worthwhile.

ok im convinced and gr8 thread

so who makes and develops this shit so i know where to put my stock money in?

>having anything less than 200 terabytes of porn
Jesus Christ, it's still summer.

As she wheeled her wheelbarrow
Through the streets broad and narrow

So what do i do with my 8tb+ media collection? Store it in a room worth of dvds for a few thousand dollars?

Imagine the random read/write speeds

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say 4.7gb per dvd. 8tb equates to around 1702 dvds. For more than 100 dvds you probably need tape backup

Hey we're talking about backup here. Not day to day usage

Your not suppose to be booting your damn OS off of it. Its for cold storage. Its a high upfront cost but it allows you to have multiple copies of your entire hot storage for rather cheap and if for some reason you need to access something on a tape the seek time isn't that bad.

Is tape cheaper than HDDs per/GB?

>Your not suppose to be booting your damn OS off of it
Just thinking about this sounds pretty hilarious actually, imagine the threads

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Yes, once you have a lot of tapes per drive, or even a lot more tapes per tape robot.

The tapes are cheap, the drives very costly.

At home it's not working out, you need like >100TB with a more linear read/write pattern before tape is maybe getting cheaper AND worth your effort swapping tapes.

WIth the newest LTO-8 standard a single tape can hold 9TB natively and up to 30TB if the data is compressible. That tape costs $160 or so but the tape drive itself will set you back a few grand. You have to be storing lots of data or lots of copies to make it worth while

>up to 30TB if the data is compressible
Don't bother with that metric.

Doing the same on HDD and running the data through zstd (~realtime compression) to some zpaq compressor (fucking slow, but compresses more) as is appropriate will do the same and is more flexible.

Most midsize companies have at least one tape library next to their rackmounted server. Any company that does anything significant online has a tape machine somewhere doing automated backups every week if not every day.

So expensive as fuck unless you are doing enterprise tier backups, got it.

Does windows support a restore image from a tape backup?

Even if you don't have alot of data getting something like lto5 which would be cheaper could still be good for making up tapes of your data and handing to to a friend or something for a off-site backup as I would personally trust tapes to be more hardy than HDDs if used for the same purpose

Yes.

Even for small enterprises you might easily be better off with some simple RAID6 array(s), they're more versatile and likely cheaper.

With LTO you're stuck between getting old tape drives without warranty (which are then cheap but also support only shitty sizes like 1.5TB tapes max), or paying multiple thousand per drive at which point you need to have a huge storage need of >100TB and at the same time the situation where shuffling those >10 tapes isn't an issue [so it's mainly when you can linearly dump out backups - maybe in rotation, like one tape drive per month].

Now tell me fuck boy, what happens to my data if my electricity cuts off for no reason, while the system is running? What happens if I want to write and read something at the same time?

Magnetic tape is a meme.

>what happens to my data if my electricity cuts off for no reason
This statement right here outs yourself as a fucking retard

nice argument

> what happens to my data if my electricity cuts off for no reason
Like with HDD, whatever got written remains there.

> What happens if I want to write and read something at the same time?
Tape drives like HDD will generally actually schedule the order in which this will happen. You'll get latency on one or the other operation, but more throughput overall.

For tape drives there can be a lot of latency so they generally only get used where this latency is okay, such as dumping out backups over time.

Your the one that acts like devices like a UPS which is purpose built to not let your PC shut off when the power goes out don't exist.

Back of the envelope autism (please check):

Those HVD's use 3 micrometer track spacing and hold 5TB per disc. Assuming the 10cm disc actually only has 8.5cm of usable space (inner ring and outer ring discarded), that yields an effective single track length of 3788 meters.

Assuming tape is 1cm wide, that would mean there would be 3333 tracks on the tape (.01m / .000003). Meaning that HVD is equivalent to about a 1.13 meter tape if it is 1cm thick.

Therefore the capacity per meter of tape is about 4.4TB/m (5TB / 1.13m).

So a modern 800 meter tape could fit 3.5PB of data (800m X 4.4TB = 3520PB)

So why isn't Google or IBM researching digital optical tape then?

No clue, I would imagine having flexible 3D surface is quite difficult to do at the micrometer track level.

Even if not 3.5 petabytes, could we probably still do better than the capacity available with magnetic tape?

Optical formats are limited by the physics of light. Light starts acting strange when dealing with tiny physical structures that start to near the wavelength of the photon.

Magnetic medium deals with stuff on a molecular level. There's a reason we use electron microscopy to image stuff at that size and not optical microscopy.

>buy an lto 8 tape
>store 30 TB of anime/porn
>make it available for download
>due to the comparatively low Random Access speed just let it go loop around instead of actively seeking the shit people want
>they have to download terabytes of stuff they dont want until it's time
>if they miss their download they need to wait a year
Devilish

>How many people do you know with 200 terabytes of porn?
*raises paw*

Why are the tape drives so expensive? How are they any different from VCRs?

Even on reddit you can find with simple searches people with 200+tb of porn

Die furfag

Optical media and tape drive fags always fail to account for the cost of time. Swapping tapes and DVDs takes time, decompressing and compressing split archives takes time, seeking takes time. 8-10TB HDDs might be a little bit expensive up front, but in the long run well worth it in the time saved along.

If your using tape you already have 10TB of HDD storage that is being used actively and you want to back it up. So you have a tape library that will auto load the tape, with software backing up everything as needed and the tape will be ejected only to be accessed again when it needs to be overwritten with a new backup or something is lost on the HDDs

I thought it was going to quartz crystals or something.

HVD is a complete fraud.

what is access time?

OP is a fag

All fun and games until you have to bake it in the oven like 2in masters

DNA storage is the future

Call me when tapes can give the same access times to non-sequential records as disk can.

>Disk drives are reaching their limits
HDD or optical disc drives?
Fuck that piece of shit digital cuck if he means optical
They haven't hit anywhere near their limits and tape has its own inherent problems
Blu rays which were released in 2006 have a model that can hold 100gb.
Pic related, there were several different types of optical discs in development that could hold over 1tb while also having an longer lifespan than ever Blu-rays which are more durable than DVDs which are more durable than CDs and I have plenty of CDs from the 80s with no disc rot even though I bought them used. Tapestry Media which was a type of Holographic Versatile Disc by Inphase Technologies could hold up to 1.6tb and that disc was being developed in the 00s.
Several TB discs would be probably available to consumers if development didn't stop on them due to people letting themselves get brainwashed by digital distribution companies.
Optical discs still cannot be beat for long term back up. Tape has its advantages but also has its disadvantages.
>muh disc rot!
>muh scratches!

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I trust my optical discs to still work in 30 years a lot more than I trust my hard drives to still work in 5

Tapes also have very limited lifetimes. And can only be written to a couple hundred times. If you add verify operations to one, it cuts its lifespan in half

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open#Tape_durability

Yeah but everything you do on a hard drive is going to be randomly accessed especially when it fragments

How big would optical discs be if development on them never stopped?

They've got 400GB micro-sd cards these days, so a wheelbarrow of hard-drives ~= a matchbox full of sd cards

I never said tapes are for everything. Writing and reading backups will be sequential, as would other large files such as movies

>I have plenty of CDs from the 80s with no disc rot even though I bought them used
Discs that you burned or albums and/or software? Disc rot's only a thing with burned discs.

>One million?

*blocks ur path*

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I wouldn't trust flash memory any more than I trust HDDs

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Yeah and I can fit all of the world's data in a few grams of DNA, that doesn't mean it's the superior medium