Magnetic Tape Storage Technology: usage, history, and future outlook
dl.acm.org
dl.acm.org
Turns out that modern drives can stretch the tape to make tracks line up right. It makes sense that as density grows, the real world effects of things like temperature and humidity require more and more work to compensate for.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-sil...
It took so long to move tapes around and read the sequentially (no random access!), and as the data corpus grew it got harder to have a practical backup, even though the data was still theoretically extant.
When it comes to the reliability of putting something on a shelf, then pulling it off twenty years later, tape still is better than everything else.
However, the drives are expensive. This industry is in dire need of disruption.
Expensive for home use, but they can buy older technology off-lease.
I can't imagine home users being interested in buying mostly used SCSI or SAS tape drives while navigating a world of format compatibility challenges and problems with improper storage. Environmental requirements for archival are narrow and most homes don't tick that box over many years or when moving.
This medium is expensive, inconvenient to use and store, and in the world of home use those are killers. You don't need to take my word for it, look around at tape home use.
Home users are better served by cloud storage or an external hard drive, maybe a home NAS, especially for the relatively low data volumes home usage usually involves.
Some years ago, after I bought a LTO-7 drive at around $3000 as a home user, I have recovered its costs after about a couple hundred terabyte of stored data.
Unfortunately, nowadays the drives for LTO-9 have increased in price, so the cutoff threshold has probably increased to several hundred terabytes.
Even when the amount of stored data does not provide significant savings in the cost of storage media, it may still be worthwhile to use magnetic tapes, for improved peace of mind and for avoiding the hassle of copying the data to newer HDDs every few years.
I am old enough to have seen enough data loss disasters, so I would never trust cloud storage, where the access to my own data would be dependent on my ability of making continuous payments to an external entity, which is really hard to predict for any distant future. Moreover, even with a fast Internet link the access speed to cloud storage is an order of magnitude slower than to a local tape drive or HDD.
The data volumes, the cost even before we look at the TCO, the performance characteristics, the time/expertise requirements, the need (hassle) for proper storage and retrieval really kill the attraction of tape for home use.
For the backup (and storage as a bonus) needs of most home users cloud or external drives are unbeatable, especially in combination.
For some threshold in the hundreds of TB range, magnetic tapes become cheaper, despite the huge price of a tape drive, while offering additional advantages, e.g. higher sequential reading and writing speeds and higher reliability.
Moreover, when computing the size of the stored data, one should take into account that the useful data size, after data compression, should be multiplied with 1.05 or 1.10, because you should add redundancy with a code able to reconstruct the data when only a small part of it is corrupted, then you should multiply by 2 or by 3, because any long-term archives must be stored as duplicated or even triplicated on different HDDs or tape cartridges, which are preferably kept at different geographical locations.
Only with such precautions you can be pretty certain that no data loss will occur after many years of data storage, reaching a reliability comparable with that of printed paper.
Cloud is not a backup. Cloud is someone else's storage.
I've had a DDS4 tape way back, which ended up dying, and that could well be the cause. My house is not going to be as clean as a server room.
I've seen tape drives taken apart and there seems to be a worrying lack of concern with any kind of air filtration on the ones I've seen at least. And I don't think it should be all that hard to deal with it. Maybe something like sucking air in through a replaceable filter and exhausting it out of the tape door.
The only options with more data capacity than a hard drive are all high end datacenter equipment. I would have had to buy fiber channel adapters and media, find a drive, a housing to put it in, and tapes. All separately, and each for several times what my entire homelab is worth.
It really is not an option for home-gamers.
It's the library/robot is what mostly matters for volume (and being able to automate). Not sure what the price is on those (along with continued support).
Only once (or very few times) overwritten?
> on a shelf
At home or in a specialized room with controlled climate?
At least I cannot find quickly the requirement in someone (or a robot) pulling each tape once a year(?) and doing a rewind? Which is formally needed for HDD.
Btw, shouldn't HDDs be much more resistant to magnetic fields than magnetic tapes?
Edit:
26TB HDD Non-operating / storage:
Temperature -40 to 70°C (Storage 0 to 70°C)
Relative humidity 5 to 95% non-condensing
Maximum wet bulb temperature: 35°C non-condensing
Maximum temperature gradient: 30°C/Hour
LTO 9+:
Recommended Storage Environment: 15 to 25℃ / 20 to 50%RH / Max Wet Bulb Temperature: 26℃.
Stray magnetic field at any point on tape not to exceed 50 oersteds (4000 ampere/meter).
[1] https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-library...
[2] https://www.fujifilm.com/uk/en/business/data-management/data...
[3] https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/storage-deep-archive?topic=media...
Honestly curious about your experience.
Plus, all floppy drives are now multiple decades old.
A new, modern removable magnetic disc format will certainly perform orders of magnitude better, but not anywhere close to to any other modern format in speed, density, or short-to-medium term stability.
We could make fantastic floppy drives today, but there is simply no economic reason to spend a billion dollars in R&D on it.