TLDR:
25GB / inch^2 … ( 330TB / cartridge )
Holy molly, 330TB per Tape thats alot of Storage/Volume
This is such a nothingburger.
Tapes are absurdly slow. This 330TB tape will take how many days to read or write to it?
I suppose that there are uses for it such as archiving… but in general its useless.
Not to mention that tapes go bad easily, and the drives go bad. And when a tape drive goes bad years down the road, you have to find another compatible tape drive to recover your data… which is bound to be expensive and difficult.
Tapes suck.
I mean the tapes are usually used for ColdStorage to backup SANs as another redundant part of the Storage, it will be used as last resort, but i get your point.
-Fallen
Tapes are for COLD STORAGE… speed is not an issue because you’re not supposed to be accessing it.
Why would it take days to fill a tape? Companies have been using tapes for ages as the last link in the chain in backup solutions. It’s the same length of tape, just WAY higher density of data per square inch.
I have a 600GB tape already and that alone makes my dick about as hard as possible .-."
Current LTO6 tapes only do 160MB/s. That’s 5hours 30minutes to fill up 2.5TB. Imagine 330TB. D A Y S !
Like I said, maybe tapes for archival purposes - send a weekly backup to Iron Mountain or something. But frankly, It’s probably cheaper and easier to send a hard drive. And with a hard drive, you don’t have to worry about having a good tape drive in 3 years when you have to get that tape for some sort of audit or lawsuit.
Have you analyzed how dumb that is? That shitty old tape doesn’t even hold as much as a $50 hard drive. I don’t see what the excitement is - other than it’s slow, prone to failure, and beyond obsolete.
Uhhh huh. Okay so they keep developing them for shits and giggles, just throwing research and development money down a hole for no reason or return?
I know, right? The only thing right now is that hard drives are not increasing in capacity. A 330TB tape drive has some serious capacity… However, current LTO7 only holds 6TB natively. So hard drives are still a better solution until this 330TB tape comes out - which is probably 6 years away at the earliest.
Back in the DAT days (DDS-DDS4), our data was growing faster than the pace of new tape drives came out. We had to switch to hard drives for backup because we didn’t want to spend $5-10k on autoloaders, etc, just to backup 40GB.
You have to think about the running costs down the line.
Assuming those tapes were actually market ready (spoiler alert: they’re not). Getting the same amount of storage is currently what… 330 33 drives? And that’s assuming you get 10TB drives which typically isn’t adopted really well yet, but that’s not the point.
330 drives spinning all the time (because spinning them up and down when you access them is kinda shit) takes a lot of energy for doing nothing at all. A tape just lies there until it’s taken out and into the tape reader, and doesn’t cost anything to operate on its own.
Back to reality though:
Even current tapes are bigger in capacity already. An LTO-7 tape is 15TB compressed, 6TB uncompressed right now (around 300MB/s iirc). The current top-end HDDs are 12TB. Not only that, they are also smaller, about half the size of a harddrive. That’s 30TB in the space a 3,5’’ drive takes up - about 2.5x density (equal when uncompressed obvioiusly). And not to forget, a tape has no mechanical failure. Yes, sure, the tape ages and yes they also loose capacity the more writes you do, just like HDDs. The difference is though that a Tape has no moving parts that can easily fail or wear out.
They also don’t produce any heat as opposed to HDDs (though you do have to control the climate somewhat, but usually the tape-libraries are enclosed and take care of that on their own).
For cold storage, and a lot of it, tape-libraries are still a go to. Tape libraries just have an immense density compared to a similar capacity in HDDs.
Is there any reason this technology cannot be used for HDDs? The article merely says that they put on smaller particles and developed smaller read/write heads. Sounds like that should work for hard drives as well.
Could also be that the article is missing some crucial information, as there’s a lot of bull in there.
Hm good question, I’d imagine at that point the speed of the platter is a bit of an issue? Not sure…
I would imagine it is just a question of accuracy. The tape will be relatively slow moving compared to a HDD platter spinning, and the read head on a tape is static where as a HDDs read head is moving back and forward across the also moving platter.
So you have two high speed moving parts to coordinate in a HDD and might need some play or space to account for over run where the tape is much slower and can do more accurate high density reading and writing.
Though I do not actually know this is just what came to mind.
330TB is 330x1TB or 33x10TB, just wanted to correct that 
whoops… math… it’s hard
Do you really not understand what COLD data storage is???
It means offline or unpowered. For tape storage, unpowered is key. Extraordinarily low operating cost. You can dump fantastic amounts of data into a warehouse and not worry about power / cooling.
…as mihawk90 says…