Why the Future of Data Storage Is Still Magnetic Tape

https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/why-the-future-of-data-storage-is-still-magnetic-tape

by sohkamyung • 8 years ago

142 155 8 years ago

spectrum.ieee.org

While, Intel Introduces "Ruler" Server SSD Form-Factor.

"Intel on Tuesday introduced its new form-factor for server-class SSDs. The new "ruler" design is based on the in-development Enterprise & Datacenter Storage Form Factor (EDSFF), and is intended to enable server makers to install up to 1 PB of storage into 1U machines while supporting all enterprise-grade features."

ref: https://www.anandtech.com/show/11702/intel-introduces-new-ru...

sliken8• 8 years ago

Seems kinda odd to mention uber expensive flash when talking about, cheaper than spinning disk, tape.

paavoova• 8 years ago

But for how many years is unpowered data integrity guaranteed for modern enterprise flash storage? Magnetic media excels at archival. In fact, plain old paper does, too, provided it's stored properly. I bring this up only because storage doesn't necessarily require on-demand retrieval, and so flash storage may not be much use in those cases.

sliken8• 8 years ago

Dunno, had a room with 120 tapes and 100 spinning disks or so. The room hit 110F or so during an AC failure. 120 tapes died, zero disks. Actually I tried only 10 or so, before giving up. Tapes do seem much more sensitive, the storage temperature (non-operating) was the same as the operating temp of the disks.

Don't tapes have issues with print through and adhesion if not regularly used? I seem to recall best practices including something like annual seek to the end and seek to the beginning. Seems pretty similar to spinning disks.

I'm less sure of flash drives on a shelf.

zaarn7• 8 years ago

For the price of a 1TB SSD I can get you a 12TB/30TB Tape, easily between 10 or 30 times as much storage.

And as a bonus, while a SSD is only guaranteed to retain data without power for a year, tapes are designed for decades of cold storage.

Additionally, you could put up to 2x4x9 (HxWxD) tapes in there, at max capacity that is about 864TB/2.16PB

The only downside is you need another 1U to read the tapes, though the rest is automatic if you have a robotic tape library.

nishantvyas2• 8 years ago

Well my point was not to show flash as superior but to point out the development in that area... every use-case has reason be it flash or Magnetic... author choose to paint Magnetic as better alternative to Flash (in capacity dimension), which is obviously can not be true for all the use-cases... (same for flash) my comment it to high-light that fact...

mmt8• 8 years ago

author choose to paint Magnetic as better alternative to Flash (in capacity dimension)

I'm having trouble finding where in the article that occurred.

To me, it seemed to ignore flash/SSD, as the principle premise was that tape survives due to its low cost (at scale), so only the highest-density HDDs were mentioned.

CharlesW• 8 years ago

Mark Lantz is manager of the Advanced Tape Technologies at IBM Research Zurich

Seems a bit odd to see such a blatant P.R. piece in IEEE Spectrum.

Wasn't optical going to eat rust-based cold data storage technologies? What happened?

sliken8• 8 years ago

Software got better. Compression, deduplication, pure incremental backups (single level zero) , reverse diffs, etc all make random access read/write backups cheaper and more attractive.

I've heard it speculated that glacier's slow restore times is consistent with a large number of optical disks and robots for loading. Never heard it substantiated though.

wmf3• 8 years ago

Optical discs are now up to 300 GB and they have caddies the size of an LTO tape that hold 12 discs. Seek time is obviously better than tape but I don't know about the price. The only remaining vendors are/were Sony and Panasonic.

https://panasonic.net/cns/archiver/

https://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2016/03/everspan-optical-c... (Sony Everspan dropped off the Internet; did they go out of business?)

jl6• 8 years ago

Archival Disc doesn’t appear to be available to buy yet.

Jaruzel• 8 years ago

From a cheaper end-user/consumer point of view, the only real option for optical disc storage is BD-XL, which is a 3 or 4 layer Writable BluRay Disc supporting 100GB/128GB per disc.

In comparison to tape, it's not that much storage, but fairly cheap to implement at home. £60 for the drives, and about £15 per 100GB disc.

Rafuino3• 8 years ago

While there's an explosion of data that we keep hearing about, the aspect I'm curious about is how much of that data will at any one point be "hot" or even "warm," in that it needs to be processed and analyzed in short order (talking microseconds or nanoseconds, not in tens of seconds like tape (or more as the data then needs to be sent over a network to a server somewhere else)). Cold storage can be archived on tape or HDDs, sure, but as compute continues to grow, surely more and more data will need to be hot or warm at any given moment. Just whether that hot/warm data will grow its overall share of data in existence or simply grow at the same rate is what I wonder about.

CaliforniaKarl3• 8 years ago

So, first I would quibble a bit with the time scales you're talking about, as tape access could easily be more than tens of seconds, depending on status: Even a loaded tape might take a minute to reposition, if the data you want is at the opposite end.

In the world I support, everything has to be funded by something. We have our "cheap and deep" storage, for example (http://oak-storage.stanford.edu), but labs who use it have to pay for it.

Unchecked growth is highly unlikely, as grants run out eventually, and then the data will have to go somewhere else. Often these days, that ends up being Google Drive, but there is demand for tape archival storage.

Even the Stanford Digital Repository (https://library.stanford.edu/research/stanford-digital-repos...), who are extremely serious when they talk about "long-term", say they're developing pricing models.

Rafuino3• 8 years ago

Well, I was keying off the article itself, which said the following: The long length of the tape held in a cartridge—normally hundreds of meters—results in average data-access times of 50 to 60 seconds

It's tens of seconds, up to a minute, but that's just average, so I think we're on the same page here!

Even when not in academia, everything has to be funded by someone at some point. Sounds like you have a pretty awesome job though, and I imagine Stanford is one of the least likely to get cut off from precious NSF grants!

dingaling2• 8 years ago

When I started working on mainframes at a big financial company there were jokes about the 'tape monkeys' which loaded tapes when we requested old datasets. We laughed and dismissed that, surely everything was mechanised.

It was only after a year or so that I was cleared to visit the data centre and discovered that the mechanical tape silos had failed years ago. Every tape had to be located and loaded by hand. I felt guilty about all those datasets I had ordered on whim... and was surprised that the DC guys didn't have a 'Hit List' of progammers.

Rafuino3• 8 years ago

I'd be very paranoid if I were you :)

gHosts• 8 years ago

Ahh, the old old old saying, "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a stationwagon full of tapes" still holds true.

samschooler• 8 years ago

This actually seems like a fun math calculation... Has anyone done this before?

jmpman• 8 years ago

If I remember right, it was a problem in Tanenbaum’s book.

scrooched_moose• 8 years ago

XKCD What If #31 is a good one.

https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/

gamegoblin• 8 years ago

You could easily fit 10PB in the back of a pickup truck (a thousand 10TB hard drives). San Francisco to NYC is a 4 day drive at 12 hours a day.

So that’s 10PB/4 days = 231 Gbps

Not bad!

dingaling2• 8 years ago

Pendantically it's a trick question; the bandwidth of a tape is 0 MHz.

moonbug• 8 years ago

Yeah, Amazon. It's their Snowball product

reaperducer2• 8 years ago

Yeah, but the latency is a killer.

I haven’t thought about SneakerNet since the late 80’s floppy disk days.

rosege• 8 years ago

It probably will hold true for a long time due to increasing media densities

mhandley• 8 years ago

The problem is you don't care about the fastest link on a path - the bottleneck link bandwidth is what matters. The stationwagon isn't the bottleneck; the tape drive is.

rout395742• 8 years ago

Streaming, tape compares favorably with HDD TFA suggested twice the speed?. Random access, of course, tape blows. :P

So really, the bottleneck is _mounting_ the tape.

Aaron1011• 8 years ago

And tape is very secure, with built-in, on-the-fly encryption

What exactly is this referring to?

wmf3• 8 years ago

It probably means the drive does the encryption, but so do hard drives and SSDs.

rout395742• 8 years ago

yeah, that. KMS involving the library and maybe an external key server.

raziel27012• 8 years ago

I can't seem to find this information with my google-fu, but does anyone know if magnetic tapes such as in vhs and cassette tapes have perpendicular magnetic anisotropy?

reaperducer2• 8 years ago

I’m not entirely sure what it is that you’re asking. But if you’re asking if the heads for an audio cassette are angled, the answer is no. They’re perfectly perpendicular.

For VHS, yes, they are angled. 30 degrees, IIRC.

If that’s, indeed, what you’re asking.

raziel27012• 8 years ago

I was referring to whether the magnetization lies along the normal of the film/tape or if it's in plane. HDDs were able to increase density by moving to materials that had a magnetization with perpendicular anisotropy but I can't seem to find confirmation if cassette tapes and vhs had in plane anisotropy back then. More so I can't seem to find if today's magnetic tape storage has moved to perpendicular magnetic anisotropy.

It seems

coding123• 8 years ago

So... who actually uses them in the age of AWS / S3. Is this becoming a much much much smaller group?

SteveNuts• 8 years ago

Don't forget about glacier.

Phlarp• 8 years ago

I thought the consensus on glacier was that it was optical backed storage? Has that changed?

gwbas1c• 8 years ago

https://aws.amazon.com/glacier/

Looks like tape as a service.

sneak• 8 years ago

Glacier’s actual storage backend technology has never been disclosed, although this is plausible. Other proposed technologies are racks of older (less efficient) disks that are not always spun up, huge slow flash memory banks, et c.

hyperion2010• 8 years ago

Last I heard the best thinking on glacier was that it was the dead space on the normal s3 drives which is inaccessible at normal SLA levels because IO is saturated.

chias2• 8 years ago

I would say AWS / S3 almost certainly uses them for backups. So, depending on your outlook, everyone who relies on S3 does by extension.

gpapilion• 8 years ago

S3 does not use tapes to backup. It’s reliant on large scale and erasure coding to achieve its slo around storage. They aren’t looking for point in time recovery, they only guarantee availability.

I’d say this the same for any systems optimizing for availability over RPO.

snaky• 8 years ago

It might be hard to imagine reading HN, that outside of SV there are more businesses who use tapes than businesses who use AWS.

sytelus• 8 years ago

TLDR;

Today, a modern tape cartridge can hold 15 terabytes. And a single robotic tape library can contain up to 278 petabytes of data.

sliken8• 8 years ago

Seems pretty terrible considering that a tape has crazy more surface area (100 to 1000s of feet x 1" or so) and a 14TB disk is just a few square inches of usable area (2 inch^2 or so per platter).

scottLobster• 8 years ago

Not if you consider that the tape can be spooled, elimating any concerns about physical volume, and data spread over a larger area means potential corruption is more distributed. You also don't need to fill the tape cases with helium.

sliken8• 8 years ago

Anyone know what exact tape they are talking about? When I google 15TB tape I only find a LTO-7 which is 6TB native, and 15TB compressed. Assuming a compression a compression ratio of 2.5 to 1 seems pretty crazy to me.

userbinator• 8 years ago

They're probably referring to the TS1155 variant of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_3592 .

To be honest I never really understood the main reason for adding compression, especially since you can compress individual files far better using existing algorithms and then write those to tape. It must be a marketing thing.

ggm• 8 years ago

IBM bubble memory

sqldba• 8 years ago

The problem is it's near impossible to get a tape backup system at home.

It's all fun to say "oh a single tape can do 15TB" but it must cost in the thousands and thousands of dollars.

CaliforniaKarl3• 8 years ago

I think that's because the market has shrunk so much.

I remember when I was younger, I got a single SCSI external tape drive, and some tapes, from the Micro Center in Cincinnati Ohio. I then used that to back up my computer while I was in college. I've forgotten so many of the details, like the model of drive and tape, and the backup software (it was Mac OS). I do know it wasn't LTO, though, because it had to be rewound.

These days, were I to do something like that, I'd do BD-R. Yeah, you're only talking 50 GB or so (uncompressed) per disc, but that's not bad!

mrpippy• 8 years ago

Probably Retrospect for the backup software, it was the standard on Mac OS. I feel like 8mm was probably the most common consumer (i.e. cheap) tape format, but also could’ve been 4mm.

jabl• 8 years ago

As a kid, we had one of those home/small business targeted drives that attached to the PC via the floppy drive controller. QIC, or whatever it was called. Native capacity was ~120 MB, and the drive had some built-in compression so it was marketed as 250 MB. It made a horrible screeching noise when running.

Linux even had a driver for it at some point (ftape), but IIRC it has since been removed due to lack of use. Never used it though, by the time I got more into Linux that drive was already obsolete.

But yeah, today the startup cost of a tape drive is so high that it doesn't make sense for home usage. At home I use borg backup (https://www.borgbackup.org/ ) nowadays, backing up to external USB hard drives.

memco• 8 years ago

LTO has to rewind in certain circumstances. The file listing can be browsed without having to seek, but the accessing the content, writing or erasing cannot. Still somewhat unlikely it was LTO, but probably not due to the rewinding.

kartickv• 8 years ago

What is LTO, and why doesn't it need rewinding?

ams61103• 8 years ago

I knew a guy in the 1990s who hacked a VCR to be a data backup device. I can't recall if he used the video track or the HD Audio track but he said the tapes actually had quite a large capacity and of course were not very expensive.

gehwartzen• 8 years ago

Would be great if this was the sort of thing local libraries could help out with; they provide the read/write hardware and you bring the tape and data.

TheAceOfHearts• 8 years ago

It would be great if magnetic tape were more accessible for consumers. A while back I was reviewing local backup and storage options, and I read up a bit on it. I think it scales better when you have massive amounts of data, but the initial price is fairly steep.

At the consumer level it makes way more sense to buy HDDs. My suggestion would be to pick up something like the EasyStore 8TB external HDD [0] (on sale right now at Best Buy for $160, will probably drop again soon). You can open it up, extract the drive, and drop it into your computer if you want internal storage.

If you want to reduce the risk of data loss you can also fill one up with an encrypted snapshot of your important things and ship it to a family member. Very important if you live somewhere that's at risk of being destroyed by natural disasters.

[0] https://www.bestbuy.com/site/wd-easystore-8tb-external-usb-3...

_iyig• 8 years ago

I’ve been happy with M-Disk DVDs for durable, disaster-proof, write-once backups. Gets a little pricey when you start talking about TB, but for family photos and important documents it more than meets my needs.

cptskippy• 8 years ago

I'm not familiar with M-Disks but I swore off optical media for long term storage around 2004 when the discs in the binder I use to carry around started turning up empty. Several of them were those Kodak Gold Archival CDRs that were supposed to last a decade but were dead inside 3 years.

jacobush• 8 years ago

Thank you, had no idea. I will consider this for photos and such.

Johnny5554• 8 years ago

For the majority of consumers, cloud backup makes more sense than tape backup -- few people have the discipline to stick to a safe backup regimen.

skookumchuck7• 8 years ago

Cloud backup will never work for 8T of data :-)

agumonkey2• 8 years ago

I was thinking that having a separate medium for backup might make people think about it differently.

supertrope3• 8 years ago

Cloud backup eliminates local disaster data loss. Which is amazing. It also introduces counter party risk, e.g. Google style service shutdown with 30-90 days to download your data or even a Megaupload like shutdown.

skookumchuck7• 8 years ago

This HP tape drive costs $2347 and can store "up to" 3T per tape.

https://www.amazon.com/HP-LTO-5-Ultrium-External-EH958B/dp/B...

The tapes are $31 and only store 1.5 T.

https://www.amazon.com/LTO5-Ultrium-1-5TB-3TB-Case/dp/B003KR...

I can buy a 1.5T hard drive for $47.

https://www.amazon.com/Generic-1-5TB-Internal-Desktop-Drive/...

I'm not seeing the cost-effectiveness of tape.

slavak3• 8 years ago

An IBM 3592 JD Advanced Data Tape Cartridge costs a bit over $200 and has a raw (uncompressed) storage capacity of 15TB. An LTO-8 cartridge is 12TB and under $200. Meanwhile the cheapest 10TB HDD Newegg sells is $304.27.

Tsiklon• 8 years ago

LTO5 is out of date, the prices you're seeing reflect there being a small but consistent demand for enterprise customers needing to purchase these to read LTO5,4 and 3 tapes and to replace failed out of warranty drives .

The latest version of the LTO standard is LTO8 and drives are around $2700 http://www.backupworks.com/Quantum-LTO-8-SAS-tape-drive-TC-L...

Raw capacity of LTO-8 is 12TB at $160, which is a much better value than LTO5

Factor in that these tapes are designed to be written to and then sit on a shelf for years and that such devices are more frequently purchased by enterprises expecting a long service life out of them (say 10+ years) the prices for the complete system do tend reflect this with a higher cost to entry.

ed_blackburn2• 8 years ago

GDPR - please delete me from all your systems.

JFC. Harry get the key to the basement, need to dig out some tapes. San, can you pop down to the store and get some matches and lighter fluid...

supertrope3• 8 years ago

I don't know how GDPR handles backups and what time tables are allowed for reasonable data retrieval and expunging.

Encryption decreases the volume of data that needs to be most carefully protected from the entire data set down to the key (and backups of said key). I imagine that data on mediums that make data retrieval and writing expensive can be encrypted with compartmentalized keys. So when Jane Doe wants her data deleted, delete the keys.

ed_blackburn2• 8 years ago

It's another reason why I think the cost of managing keys appropriately is worth it for crypto-shredding.

spiralx• 8 years ago

I don't know how GDPR handles backups and what time tables are allowed for reasonable data retrieval and expunging.

Keep a log of user ids who have requested deletion and purge their data whenever doing a restore. And don't keep backups for longer than required, which I think is generally something like five to seven years barring specific legal requirements.

Osmanthus• 8 years ago

What about scratches

oliwarner4• 8 years ago

I was thinking —like other top-level comments here— that it's a great shame that consumer level drives have died out. They're thousands of dollars and all wired for enterprise interfaces.

But I'm really surprised that nobody[1] is offering "tape backup as a service". Pay $30 per 3TB cassette (slightly over market rate), a $10 loading fee and then $1/h for 100MB/s write access. When you're done, pay another $10 and it's shipped to you. Or $5/month for fireproof storage.

This might have to be a pre-booked service, or they could buffer upload onto spinning disks and write to tape after the fact (much faster), but for storing more than 1TB, this method could be vastly cheaper.

[1]: That one quick Google could find.

kqr2• 8 years ago

How would this, in effect, be different from any serious backup service in existence today? I'm sure they do their backups of your backups on tape, and at least rsync.net is willing to ship physical media with your data to you.

oliwarner4• 8 years ago

Price!

In the simplest version of my post, you're paying for media, the time for somebody to pop it in the machine, the hire of that machine while you copy data to it over the network, and the postage of a tiny little LTO back to you for archival.

On higher density tape, you could be looking at a one-off $100 total for writing 10TB of data to tape and mailing it back. There's a lot of room between that price and the nearest incumbent to make a strong profit there.

rsync.net seems very bespoke, so they may be able to give you a tape, but you're looking at $250 per "incident" plus hardware. They waive that fee if you store more than 100TB ($2k/month).

Yeah, they're much more available but most of us aren't after cloud storage, we want a lasting backup in case the NAS dies, or the house burns down. Restore speed doesn't matter.

liftbigweights• 8 years ago

It's not cost effective with the rise of the cloud and broadband.

oliwarner4• 8 years ago

What isn't? Home tape drive ownership, sure. But what I'm proposing (essentially hiring a remote tape drive, getting the result back in the post) is vastly cheaper than cloud storage.

creatornator• 8 years ago

AWS Glacier provides a pretty cheap[0] backend for such a service. You could store 1TB for 1000GB * $0.004/(GB * mo) = $4.00/mo, which is dirt cheap, all things considered. Retrieval is about 10x that, per GB, but generally if you are storing backups, you aren't concerned about retrieving it too often, so that cost is acceptable. Compare this to the S3 bucket costs for the same storage size($10/mo for infrequent access, and $24/mo for standard), or to google drive 1TB tier ($10/mo, but no API as far as I know).

[0] https://aws.amazon.com/glacier/pricing/

oliwarner4• 8 years ago

That's per month... In just 9 months Glacier becomes more expensive than a physical SATA drive(s) of equal capacity. The longer you keep the data, the more it skews against "the cloud".

I'm definitely not claiming to have all the answers here but there are points where tiering your storage strategy to get it onto something stable and without running costs makes sense.

peterburkimsher• 8 years ago

My dad's PhD thesis is stored on a magnetic tape formatted for a PDP-11. He'd like to copy it off, but it's difficult to find a computer that can read it! Back in 2006 we went from Geneva to Lausanne to visit Musée Bolo, but their PDP-11 had a problem with its Winchester drive (hard disk) and wouldn't boot. After a few hours, we gave up. Please get in touch if you have the tools - I know he'd like his digital copy back!

Even more modern formats are difficult to copy forwards. I'm currently tidying out my old computer collection, copying off data from SCSI disks, 5.25" floppies, DD floppies, HD floppies, and CDs. My USB floppy drive can't read DD floppies.

The SCSI path requires copying to a PowerBook G3, removing the internal hard drive, putting it into a USB-PATA controller, and copying it to my laptop. I'll need to do the same for all the 2GB JAZ cartridges. I don't even have a ZIP disc reader, so I gave those two discs away to another collector so he can read them for me. The 5.25" floppies are the hardest - they don't mount even on old Macs, so I'll need to figure out how to set up ADTPro to copy them over serial from an Apple IIgs.

If you're in the area and want some old hardware/software/magazines/user manuals, please let me know!

https://www.reddit.com/r/VintageApple/comments/99223h/peters...

The lesson? If you want to keep the data, also keep the computer that can read it. And make backups.

Aaargh203182• 8 years ago

The lesson? If you want to keep the data, also keep the computer that can read it. And make backups.

Or just copy the data over the moment you get a new computer, instead of waiting for several decades. As long as you keep moving the data from generation N to generation N+1, there's no problem.

dghughes2• 8 years ago

Not quite. But possible.

I have two 1TB external hard drives. The data was added over a few years. But now to copy 1TB over USB 2.0 is beyond painful.

Fortunately I can just disassemble the drives and connect them directly. But that's if I have an old system with IDE controllers.

If I can find an IDE to USB converter I'd be back to square one (unless it is USB3). And I don't know if there is such a thing as an IDE to SATA converter.

oftenwrong• 8 years ago

Alternatively, print the data with a laser printer on acid-free paper and encase it in epoxy resin:

http://carlos.bueno.org/2010/09/paper-internet.html

vorpalhex• 8 years ago

The poor man's laser etched silicon?

tantalor2• 8 years ago

Missing one more criteria,

4. Be recoverable

How exactly do you extract the information after you drown it in resin?

swaggyBoatswain• 8 years ago

I went to CERN in Geneva last year, I was informed they still use tape technology to store data. Its works, and their datasets are very large.

http://giving.web.cern.ch/lhc-tapes

paulie_a• 8 years ago

I used to have the model file for the Titanic directly from one of the animators for the movie saved on a zip disk. The click of death made that file forever lost.

zaarn7• 8 years ago

The general advice at places like /r/datahoarder is to copy all data to a new medium every 10 years to "update" the storage interfaces and standards of the data.

ksec• 8 years ago

It is suggesting there are research that shows it is possible to have 20x times the density of current types, which tops at 15TB. But these research are like battery breakthrough, good in theory but not thought through in practice.

While we have a real roadmap, and a working solution of MAMR, much more so than the proposed HAMR from Seagate, that will scale us to 40TB per HDD by 2025, and may be more so given we don't really know the limits of MAMR yet, and we manage to put more platter inside a helium drives. Which I don't think is possible with HAMR, laser heating plate with helium filled drive has got to fun inside labs.

NAND Flash is also dropping in price, the current NAND spot price are already backed to 2016 price or may be even slightly lower. We have Fabs from Toshiba, Samsung and SK Hynix all coming online in 2019, all while 3D NAND are achieving better yields. The "Ruler" that Intel proposed has now standardises and becomes EDSFF, with up to 1PB storage in 1U. All current roadmap suggest we should hit 8PB or 16PB in 1U by 2025. In terms of 48 Drive in 4U server, HDD offers only 480TB per 1U by 2025. That is 16 to 32 times the density difference comparing to NAND.

In a system where information is stored in different drives like black blaze[1] , your reliability reaches a point ( I think, forgive me if I am wrong ) no different to those offered by Magnetic Type. What are the advantage left for using magnetic type? When cost, performance, space, reliability does no longer flavours them?

[1] https://www.backblaze.com/blog/cloud-storage-durability/

robdachshund• 8 years ago

Tapes can last for 50 years. They are the MOST stable and reliable form of storage we have.

We have also not even reached any kind of limit on density. Sony has tapes that hold hundreds of terabytes.

So, they last forever, are extremely reliable, and extremely data dense.

HDDs exploit the same concept (magnetic storage) but trade speed for reliability. NAND is more reliable but still has a shelf life, and it also relies on support chips to constitute the overall media. It's also expensive as hell.

Tape is tape. You could smash a cassette and respool the tape and read it. Its also cheap as hell per gb.

Tape will be around for decades if not centuries to come. NAND is not a challenger whatsoever.

A key piece of the puzzle here is that not only are tapes used for backup, but to free up space from data center HDDs in order to increase their shelf life.

Stop thinking of tape as archaic. Magnetic storage is the foundation of modern technology and computing, and in past decades we barely scratched the surface of its potential.

We aren't talking about audio cassettes with analog audio recorded to them. We are talking about a storage medium that is more data dense than HDD or NAND could ever be and we have yet to reach any sort of limit.

With tape you can achieve more and more space by manipulating the width and length of the tape, the tape heads, the angle at which tape is read, and the way that the data is read and stored. It's also just a plastic cassette with polyester tape coated with rust particles. It's inherently cheaper, requires no circuitry, power, or motors within the media itself, and will last 50 years.

Tape is the purest implementation of magnetic storage concepts. As such it is going to improve faster than HDDs because there are no other design factors like platters, motors, and heads. If an HDD dies, you might be able to recover the data through expensive and time consuming procedures. If your tape drive stops working, you buy another drive and still have an intact tape with all of your data.

Additionally, while SSDs are wonderful, they are a pretty backwards design when it comes to efficiency. You are essentially trying to model magnetic storage by using integrated circuits. You are storing values with digital logic in a physical state on a chip.

Its fast and more reliable than a spinning metal disk, but it's expensive and not data dense at all.

The only threat to tape is public perception of it being "old" when it's really the most robust and best engineered data format we have.

mmt8• 8 years ago

Tape is the purest implementation of magnetic storage concepts. As such it is going to improve faster than HDDs

I agree with the former, but I think your conclusion misses a critical piece of technology development: volume (which drives funding).

Of course, HDD volume is going down, while SSD volume is going up. That may well give tape enough of a comparitive advantage, if it hasn't already.

The only threat to tape is public perception of it being "old"

For a definition of "public" narrowed a bit to include only/mostly computer professionals, I'd add "slow" as a mis-perception.

Other perceptions I, personally, have is that it's expensive and inflexible, mostly in the context of startup companies. I don't believe that's any kind of threat to tape, however, since it's likely these same companies will gladly over-pay for a cloud version of tape.

Why the Future of Data Storage Is Still Magnetic Tape

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