IBM and Sony cram up to 330TB into tiny tape cartridge
arstechnica.co.uk
arstechnica.co.uk
An average truck can house anywhere between 20,000L to 40,000L [1]. Let's take an average 30,000L.
An average truck can also travel at anywhere in between 56 kph to 137 kph [2]. Let's take an average 100 kph.
The tape catridge in the image looks like it's about 4mm x 10cm x 6 cm. And it can store 330 TB.
Let's say we're transfering from New York to San Francisco. That's 4,678 km according to Google.
Total data transferred in one truck = 330 TB * ((30000 L / (1000 L / m^3)) / ((4 mm * 0.001 m/mm) * (10 cm * 0.01 cm/m) * (6 cm * 0.01 cm/m)) = 412500000 TB
Total time taken = (4678 km * (1000 m/km)) / (100 kph * (0.27 (m/s)/kph)) = 173259 s
Bandwidth = 412500000 TB / 173259 s = 2380 TB/sec = 19046 Tbps
For reference, 255 Tbps was the fastest single fibre [3]. This is a good 75 times faster.
Of course, all this comes with a network latency of 2 days.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_truck#Size_and_volume [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limits_in_the_United_Sta... [3] https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/192929-255tbps-worlds-fa...
If you're planning to actually use the data you need to add in the time need to read the tapes and put them on a usable medium.
Once you add in all of the overhead, the network comes out looking much better in comparison.
That's a broad assumption. There's a reason why AWS is finding demand for Snowball and Snowmobile. Internet connections just aren't that fast.
Also note that the Snowball/Snowmobile fit into the first use case. They are loaded up then just plugged in on arrival, and even then the total number of enterprises that have used the services is not very large. The multi-day latency on the first packet means you need to be transferring enough data that it would take more than those few days to transfer on a STM-4 or similar. It works out to a tremendous amount of data.
Of course if you are an arctic researcher who has collected hundreds of petabytes of sensor measurements and only have a satellite backhaul, then this makes tons of sense. But for anybody with a solid backbone connection the calculus is much less favorable.
You won't get away with spending less than $1,500 or so on a recent generation tape drive. Don't forget you need a SCSI card. This is the point at which most enthusiasts just turn around, walk home, and order a big stack of hard disks. Sure, you get to save a bunch of money on media. An LTO-6 cartridge costs $25, and that's 2.5TB. But tape is a pain in the ass, and since it has separate capex for throughput and capacity, you need to do the calculations for both. Then you only have one drive, so if it breaks you are sitting without it for X weeks until repairs go through. You could save money by buying older generations like LTO-5 (now two generations old), maybe $500 for a used drive on eBay and now you have to buy almost twice as many tapes which is a pain.
By comparison, with HDD you can pay $100 for a 4TB drive, grab 13 of those and you have your 50TB, all for the $1300 which is less than you'd have paid just for a bare tape drive. When hard drives break you swap them out and keep operating at reduced capacity. (I mean, I've done that with tape drives, but back then I had lots of tape drives.)
"Conventional disks are just too expensive." For small amounts of data, like 50TB, tape could quite easily be more expensive due to the fixed costs of the drive. Add the fact that you have to babysit the tape drive and swap in a new tape every so often unless you get a robot to do it for you.
"Conventional disks are too error prone." Not sure what that's about, when you have 50TB of data you're going to need to add error correction no matter whether you write it to tape or write it to HDD. In reality, you're going to have to deal with a loss of a full tape or full drive either way, plus some read errors on the available media.
I don't have exact TCO figures for you, but despite the low cost of media, tape TCO isn't that much lower than HDD, and for small amounts of data, HDD is cheaper.
Maybe, maybe you could make this work. With old refurbished drives and media, and an endless appetite for swapping out tapes, and the right software to index and manage it all, maybe you could achieve your dream while spending less money. But a couple grand will get you the HDD you need.
For a business however (if I had huge amounts of data that needed archiving i.e. >100TB) then I would definitely go the tape route. Or Glacier if I decided to be sensible.
About a year ago, I was going through some boxes at my parents house. There was a box of 5.25 DS disks holding backups of my important data. The only copy. Like all the Qic 40 tapes and Zip disks and most of the CD's and DVD's, they wound up in the trash.
For me, backing up personal stuff onto some technology has been mostly an exercise in spending time and money deleting it. I guess the practical heuristic is that if I can live with it being offline, I will live if I delete it. And the moral of the story is that deleting it sooner rather than later is cheaper.
Tape is a great technology when it makes money. It is a lousy consumer technology. Ebay shows me one "qic 40 drive." It's only twenty years later.
In exploration geophysics extremely large amounts of data are recorded onto tapes when acquiring in the field, and then either transferred over sea/land/air in a packing case to a processing centre. I wonder if this new tech will prove just as durable as current tape tech?
The idea is that when we're at a place where you can reliably manufacture 330TB tapes, fibre channel (or whatever we have then for SAN interconnects) will have caught up.
Will be a long time and quite expensive when/if these finally hit the market.
I would love to store backups on tape at home. Unfortunately harddrives are still the cheapest option in practice, and they are a bit too expensive and a bit impractical to comfortably use as offline storage (and transfer) for home use (my opinion / use case).
recently pricing out 337gb SSD drives for our production and backup servers ends up with a price about nine times that of which it would cost per terabyte of a new iMac. When you get into have 60 to 120TB it adds up but reliability is so much more important.
Now I have never looked at tape backup for home use, what is the throughput of most of these? Is this merely a limit of the interface?
Tape drives for home use don't make much sense sadly. The tapes are too expensive compared to hard drives. It's easier to buy one of those SATA docks if you want to have cold backups.
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E1681715...
That's not at all my experience, at least when it comes to LTO. Sure, TS and T10k are expensive, but they're the 'enterprise solutions'. Modern LTO tapes can be bought for ~$100 if you shop around. Less if you buy in bulk.
It's the perennial disappointment with tape drives that the media has "enterprise" pricing, making it barely better per TB than cheap consumer spinning hard drives.
But, if Youtube archived the original upload on tape before transcoding to a different format, then it would be useful. The tapes would really only be "read," in a batch manner, when they want to re-transcode to a newer codec.
Likewise, tape would be a great way to store the digital equivalent of the "negatives" once a movie, TV show, or music album is complete. No one needs instant, on-demand, random access to every shot, every take, and every camera angle. It can be pulled off the tape in 10 years when producing the Nth remaster for the new super-duper bluray version.
Too much risk that people confuse it with music cassettes?
Or perhaps too fiddly software to deal with? for me a more likely reason why USB drives overtook optical media than the media itself, btw.
For reference and to put things in context one has to look at LTO generations. From what I see their invention would fall beyond the LTO-10 standard (unless the market forces and manufacturing change dramatically by then).
LTO-7 currently holds about 6TB uncompressed, and they're about $100 per cartridge. LTO-8 will double the storage, and will probably be available by the end of next year. I'd guess the cartridges will be more expensive initially, but it's hard to say what the premium will be.
I'd be surprised if it took that long.