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Comment by mcantelon | Hacker News Reader

It's being worked on. There's a lot of overhead inherent in random access, which really isn't necessary for most applications. ;)

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That sounds interesting. Is it web scale?

yeah, you just insert your records in the only order you'd ever want to get them out

Hm, tape drives aren't even sold anymore, otherwise I might try.

It may not be a bad idea to borrow old tape-drive ideas for modern technologies - I mean, hard drives are ever slower compared to cache or RAM, and they are faster at linear seeks (like tapes) than random-access. Hard drives are the new tape?

Tapes are the new Hard Drive.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape_File_System

A Random Access Filesystem that runs on LTO5. (And it even supports OSX!) Cool hack. Just don't ask me why they bothered.

Sure they are -- tape libraries are still sold, primarily for backups, eg:

http://www.quantum.com/Products/TapeLibraries/index.aspx

http://www.dell.com/us/en/enterprise/storage/tapebackup_auto...

If you ever get a chance to poke around a large corporate data center -- see if you can check out a SL8500 or one of the TS3500 units.. They're the big things with all kinds of flying robotic arms and crap-loads of storage. Just don't try and walk inside one while the robots are moving.

For reference -- an LTO5 Tape holds about 3TB of data. (and has decent compression -- so that could go much higher)

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