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Comment by paulmd | Hacker News Reader

It has never really entered the public consciousness since it's not a consumer-facing technology but tape development has continued apace. LTO-9 should be hitting the market very soon and supports up to 45TB per tape (compressed capacity, 18TB raw).

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.

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> LTO-9 should be hitting the market very soon and supports up to 45TB per tape (compressed capacity, 18TB raw).

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.

> LTO is cool and all but is the "compressed capacity" number really something to repeat with a straight face?

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).

I am trying to find something what would be make compression done by the tape controller favorable. Maybe it somehow makes the recovery more fault tolerant in the long run? Because it knows about the intricacies of the medium. Just guessing, I know nothing about tape storage

My first LTO drive installation was on a multi user SGI CAD application server. This system did all the compute and data management for roughly 30 users. I/O streaming was easy and efficient.

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 announcement [1] is of lab results, so yes "research numbers". A commercial product might be years out (if ever developed). This is not meant to belittle the achievement (which is awesome), but to clarify what has been done and what to expect.

[1] https://www.fujifilm.com/news/n201216_01.html

Amazon Glacier is tape-based, so anyone certainly can get access to tape for backup purposes.

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