Magnetic Tape Storage Break Through Will Make Your Hard Drive Seem Tiny

[turbinetree]

The amount of data you can squeeze onto a hard drive continues to grow by leaps and bounds, with Seagate announcing a 60TB SSD late last year. But thanks to IBM and Sony, tape might still reign supreme when you need to archive massive amounts of data, as the companies have jointly developed a new kind of tape that can reportedly hold 201-gigabits, or roughly 25GB, per square inch.

That might not seem impressive given you can buy tiny microSD cards that are capable of holding 256GB of movies, photos, and music. But when you fill a cartridge with over a kilometer of this new tape, you can store 330TB of data in less space than a hard drive takes up. Accessing that data is no where near as instantaneous as it is with SSDs or even hard drives, but for companies that need to hold onto years worth of data ‘just in case,’ tape cartridges can be a more affordable long-term solution.

Unlike the platters in computer hard drives that feature ultra-thin layers of various metals to store tiny magnetic charges, tape needs to be able to flex, bend, and be wound onto a spool. As a result, it’s usually covered in a thin layer of iron oxide or chromium particles which are magnetized or de-magnetized by a machine to create individual bits of data—aka the ones and zeroes that make digital communications possible.

http://gizmodo.com/magnetic-tape-data-storage-breakthrough-will-make-your-1797462392


Cool

[Guy Whitey Corngood]

1. K&R! nt

[retread]

2. Need a way to store the massive amounts of data being "captured"!! n/t

[hunter]

3. The NSA will be buying this stuff by the ton.

Sometimes I think there's a asteroid headed to earth, unstoppable, dinosaur extinction size, and somebody is trying to squirrel away all the data they can.

Maybe that's the real reason the internet was created...

[lapfog_1]

6. nope

The internet was created by ARPA (Advanced Projects Research Agency), the forerunner of DARPA. This was back in the mid 1960s (before my time). It was created to provide redundantly pathed communications capability so that the military CinC could continue to operate in the face of a large nuclear strike.

All communications up until then were circuit based, meaning that if I wanted to send a message from DC to an outpost in Alaska... either wires or microwaves (or satellites, but that's another issue) would have to dedicate a circuit between me (my computer) and the destination.

The Arpanet was created so that tiny bits of the message would be stuffed into "packets" and the packets would take various routes to the destination, to be reassembled there into the message I wanted to send.

Hence IP and later TCP/IP.

In the middle 1970's I worked on the software for the IMPs (Internet Message Processor) that would translate the assembled packets for machines of different basic character sets (not everything was ASCII back then).

I think at the time there may have been 12 computers connected to the Arpanet.

[hunter]

7. I first signed on in 1979 and I've been here since...

...at first by the kindness or stupidity of my mentors, I'm not sure which. Maybe they just needed a few fools to test the foolproofing. Maybe I was the fool. But I also had a propensity for helping others, which kept the computer illiterate out of the admins' hair, most admins being overworked and underappreciated grad students who would lock themselves away behind the glass, their faces frozen permanently into the expression of someone doing something really really important, like adding another room to Hunt the Wumpus.

As I recall the connections between those early Arpanet computers were the equivalent of a 56k modem. 56k served an entire university. And people were sharing that connection.

I converted a few EBCDIC files to ASCII along the way too. Later I was converting files to and fro between my Atari 800 and whatever other computers I might be using.

I was allowed to sign onto my university account remotely, but I only had a 300 baud modem...

I vividly remember the release of 2BSD. I was in the lab at the time and soon decided vi was the most wonderful thing in the world. I was so excited I wrote an entire novel, which did some significant damage to my grade point average.

So far as the tinfoil hat stuff, that's just me being silly. But yeah, you never know what anyone else will believe, especially in a nation where Trump is President.

[lapfog_1]

4. Yes, I was a panelist (for Seagate) at a Library of Congress

symposium on the subject of coming breakthroughs in data storage.

The IBM folks were there to tout the new areal bit density of tape especially compared to limits of hard drives (HDD).

The high capacity flash (SSD) that you speak of is now "3D nand" flash... with more breakthroughs to follow. However, the issue of flash taking over computer storage is one of the billions of dollars of investment to create the wafer scale fabs needed to create the nand chips used in typical flash drives. There is currently a nand shortage (thanks to the tablets and phones).

Tape still has the issue of "time to data" (robotics to find the tape, put it in a drive, seek down the tape to the bits you want, etc).

It's good for deep archive storage, but not for random searching to find something... like storing years and years of surveillance video from airports and banks and traffic cams around the world and then wanting to ask "have we ever seen this person before anywhere in the world" when trying to discover the travel habits of a suspected terrorist.

i.e. tape - write once, read almost never.

Oh, btw, one thing that I'm famous for declaring about archival tape solutions... You HAVE to read the tape about once every 4 to 5 years... mostly to copy the data to the next generation of tape... otherwise, the tape will rot OR the software or hardware that can read the tape will be decommissioned. Current data rates from tape make this a difficult task if you have PBs or Exabytes of data in storage.

[MineralMan]

5. Interesting, but of no use to me, really.

My latest PC has a 1 TB hard drive. My last had a 512 MB hard drive. I've never come close to filling up more than about 100 MB of any hard drive. I can still mirror my entire system on a 64 GB thumb drive, and I have three of those with mirror images on them.

I can see where this new tape technology will have uses, but not for PCs, I think. Besides, having extracted tape from a cassette drive in a car a couple of times when a cassette malfunctions, I can't even imagine the mess such a tape might create.

BTW, does anyone want a couple hundred VHS tapes? Lots of movies and stuff, some things that aren't available in any other format. They're taking up space I could use for something else, you know, so, just let me know, and I'll box them up and send them to you.