Sony and IBM collaborate to develop 330TB tape storage

[HEXUS]

Magnetic storage tech boasts areal recording density of 201Gb per square inch.

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[gsmsupport]

Great Move I think

[lumireleon]

wow! So Facebook/Twitter will no longer need to secretly compress posted pictures to 640x480.

[devBunny]

330TB is all very well but it's pie in the sky...

Currently magnetic storage on spinning disks is much less space efficient with a 3.5-inch HDD (also about a third of a litre volume) which top out at 12TB.

.. because, currently, tape cartridges for Joe MediaHoarder top out at a mere 6TB, the drives are very expensive and the cartridges are not cheap.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open#Generations

LTO-6 ... 2.5TB ... £1300-£1700 ... https://www.scan.co.uk/search?q=lto-6
Cartridge ... £25 ... https://www.scan.co.uk/search?q=tape+cartridge+lto-6

LTO-7 ... 6.0TB ... £2700-£3500 ... https://www.scan.co.uk/search?q=lto-7
Cartridge ... £90 ... http://www.misco.co.uk/product/2578164/HPE-LTO-7-Data-Backup-Tape-Cartridge

Break-even for LTO-6 is about 90TB and for LTO-7 it's about 280TB (versus 8TB harddisks at £200).

[Skorne]

Nevermind 330TB being pie in the sky seems storage is yet another field where we hear wild tales about scientific breakthroughs allowing 10 billion petabytes to be stored on a single molecule and yet here we are still with good old clunky magnetic tapes.

[aidanjt]

.. because, currently, tape cartridges for Joe MediaHoarder top out at a mere 6TB, the drives are very expensive and the cartridges are not cheap.

And then, there's those access times lol.

[peterb]

330TB is all very well but it's pie in the sky...



.. because, currently, tape cartridges for Joe MediaHoarder top out at a mere 6TB, the drives are very expensive and the cartridges are not cheap.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear...en#Generations

LTO-6 ... 2.5TB ... £1300-£1700 ... https://www.scan.co.uk/search?q=lto-6
Cartridge ... £25 ... https://www.scan.co.uk/search?q=tape+cartridge+lto-6

LTO-7 ... 6.0TB ... £2700-£3500 ... https://www.scan.co.uk/search?q=lto-7
Cartridge ... £90 ... http://www.misco.co.uk/product/25781...Tape-Cartridge

Break-even for LTO-6 is about 90TB and for LTO-7 it's about 280TB (versus 8TB harddisks at £200).

True, the hardware is expensive, and for Ultrium 6 and above, the problem is getting data to them fast enough to stream - they are usually SAS or fibre channel, so most home users would need additional hardware. I use Ultrium 4 with a SCSI i terrace which will stream continuously.

But once the hardware is bought, the cartridges are cheap, and so multiple backups are easy.

Nevermind 330TB being pie in the sky seems storage is yet another field where we hear wild tales about scientific breakthroughs allowing 10 billion petabytes to be stored on a single molecule and yet here we are still with good old clunky magnetic tapes.

Because magnetic tapes are robust, with arcival times > 20 years, and cheap.

And then, there's those access times lol.

But that doesn't really matter for archive/backup purposes.


The IBM Sony solution isn't aimed at the home user (obviously!) but at large corporations and the like.