Crazy good tech accomplishment right there.
In a way, I am somehow comforted. Tape remaining relevant kind of dropped off my radar. Good to see.
317Gb / square inch AND 15km/h transport speed? That is nuts fast.
Wonder how robust it really is? Of course at those densities and potential transfer rates there is ample room for error recovery.
Not quite sure where IBM's numbers here come from, their previous numbers don't match up to the progression of the LTO tape series' capacity. Maybe they are citing "research numbers" that they can do in a lab but aren't production-ready yet. I would certainly assume they are citing "compressed" data figured there.
But certainly tape has continued to progress much faster than most people would have imagined. Big tape libraries are still a thing in certain environments and they work very well, there is no better solution for bulk cold storage.
LTO is cool and all but is the "compressed capacity" number really something to repeat with a straight face? The tape holds 18TB, we don't need to pretend it's anything else.
> But certainly tape has continued to progress much faster than most people would have imagined.
Mostly it has. But I'm somewhat worried about the future after the sudden late-game announcement that LTO-9 would have a 50% capacity improvement instead of the usual doubling.
No, but it's been the standard in the tape industry for decades. Probably dates back to the first tape controllers that had builtin compression (so compression didn't tax the main cpu).
IRIX allowed for live file system backups and the drive doing compression meant all that happening with negligible user performance impact.
Was literally set it and forget it, aside from tape rotation into off site storage.
Compression would have had an impact.
We don't do multi user app serving much today, so maybe a smart drive has less benefit. But it mattered then. 2000's era.
The hardware is not going to read 300 Gb/in density at bicycle speeds. :)