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The Linear Tape-Open standard will be extended by another two generations, increasing raw/uncompressed capacity from LTO-8's 12 TB to 192 TB on an LTO-12 tape:
The LTO Program Technology Provider Companies (TPCs), Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM and Quantum, announced the specifications of the latest LTO Ultrium format, generation 8, which is now available for licensing by media manufacturers.
The LTO Program also released a new LTO technology roadmap, detailing specifications up to twelve (12) generations of tape technology, extending the total capacity of data held on one LTO Ultrium generation 12 tape cartridge to 480TB – an increase of 32 times the capacity of current-generation 7 cartridges.
The new LTO generation 8 specifications are designed to double the tape cartridge capacity from the previous LTO generation 7, with customers now being able to store up to 30TB per cartridge when compressed. In an effort to push the innovation boundaries of tape technology going forward, the current LTO format required a recording technology transition that supports capacity growth for future LTO generations. To address this technological shift and maintain affordability in times of extreme data growth, the latest LTO generation 8 specifications are intended to be only backwards compatible with LTO generation 7 cartridges.
Despite records like 220-330 TB uncompressed in the laboratory, these 100+ TB capacities won't be available for a while:
[Spectra Logic's] CEO and founder, Nathan Thompson, said: "Spectra foresees the availability of LTO-9 at 24TB per tape cartridge in two years; LTO-10 at 48TB in four years; LTO-11 at 96TB in six or seven years; and LTO-12 at 190+TB in eight to nine years. I firmly believe that no other commercial data storage technology available now or on the horizon, will keep pace with or fulfill the world's increasing demand for cost-effective, long-term data storage like tape technology."
Also at IT Jungle.
Previously: IBM and FUJIFILM Create Equivalent of 220 TB Tape Cartridge
LTO Tape Sales Remain Steady
IBM Claims Densest Tape Storage Record (330 TB)
(Score: 1, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 26 2017, @10:04PM (12 children)
And no guarantee you can find/repair/operate a deck in 10-20 years if you need the backup as anything better than a current-generation live backup.
While they are slow and require swapping media more often, optical discs/drives will still be a better option for long term recovery, given stable compositions. I've had organic dye disks last me upwards of 20 years (yes I have some from the 90s with errors still within the 2312(?) byte error correction for a system-readable 2048 byte block.) And since the drives have continued supporting old media each generation, rather than changing the whole whole supported format almost every generation, with only 1 or a few generations of deprecated formats 'maybe supported' (go ask all those people who have had problems recovering tapes on newer LTO drives or models other than the original they recorded them with) you'd be a fool to rely on LTO tapes for anything other than recent backups for recovery after a catastrophic hardware failure or hacking attempt. And the latter is risky with tape since they can be rewritten, whereas WORM media is nominally immutable (excluding some new 'secure erase' features in DVD/Bluray drivers that can trigger all the dye bits so the disk is like one bit row of 0s or 1s.)
(Score: 3, Funny) by takyon on Thursday October 26 2017, @10:50PM (2 children)
I put the UNCOMPRESSED capacities in the headline.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 27 2017, @03:13AM (1 child)
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Friday October 27 2017, @12:01PM
I think the AC is just depressed.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Friday October 27 2017, @08:16AM (6 children)
A quick search shows LTO-1 tapes still being made. LTO-2 drives (which will read LTO-1 tapes) are still being made. So that's 17 years so far (the tech was only released in 2000, so it can't go back 20 years yet).
That's fairly typical of tape. You can still buy a DDS2 drive as well if you have any tapes from the mid '90s. Looks like you can still get a QIC-80 drive as well.
But really, if the data still matters, you should be reading it out and (after verifying it), writing it to new media every few years.
LTO-7 has a raw capacity of 6TB. That's an assload of Blueray disks. LTO does offer WORM as well.
CD,DVD, and Blueray have the same guarantee that LTO does. No actual iron-clad commitments but a considerable demand makes continuation profitable.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday October 27 2017, @05:55PM (5 children)
OK, but....
Around 1984 I needed to read some 800 bpi even parity tapes, that were the standard in 1960, when they were written, and couldn't find anybody who could read them. Odd parity could still be read, but not even parity. But by the standard (of 1960) even parity was used for BCD (i.e., text) and odd parity was for machine native. And the machines had changed. And it could still be read and converted, even the floating point data, if it was odd parity. The even parity, which is what *should* have been more portable, couldn't be read. So we couldn't recover the raw data (it was 1960 census data, and the census bureau said they hadn't kept it on tape), but only the processed data, which didn't have all the fields, and had massaged some of the fields.
FWIW, I think the problem was that an even parity space couldn't be distinguished from an interrecord gap, but why that was a problem in 1984(est.) and not in the early 1960's I don't know.
My take away is to have multiple copies in different forms of your important data, because you can't predict which ones will become unreadable.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Friday October 27 2017, @07:15PM (4 children)
That may have been a quirk of the particular hardware you had. Even now I see a project to read old 7 track tapes that manages to read even parity. I can't say I ever worked w/ 7track. I did deal with reading 9 track tapes into a PC in the mid '90s, but the format was still in production then.
Really the 7 track should have been copied to 9 track in the late '60s as the sun set on 7 track. Likewise, now is a good time to copy archival data from LTO-1 tapes to LTO-7. On the plus side, they can fit 60 old tapes on one new tape. The old LTO-1 tapes can still be used for ephemeral backups if necessary.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday October 28 2017, @12:41AM (3 children)
I think you have your decades wrong. I know for certain that in the 1960's we didn't have access to 9-track tapes. (Well, actually I know this for the 1970's. In the 1960's I was still in college, and writing to tape was NOT one of the things covered in the computer classes I took. I had to learn that on the job, later.)
That said, I'll agree that the data should have been more carefully preserved, and we discovered that when the mid 1980s rolled around. But we were on a limited budget, computer time was quite expensive, and the original data was supposed to be being kept by someone else anyway.
But IIRC 9-track tapes didn't come in until the IBM-360, which we didn't have access to, but it was well into the 1970's. We did our tape handling on time rented on a 1401 system that we accessed by courier, and they didn't have 9-track tapes. I think they retired the system before switching to 9-track tapes. (They did eventually get a 360/30 for tape handling, but I'm pretty sure that was a lot later.) I think we only used 9-track tapes for 3 years or less before the push started to convert to 6250 bpi tapes...with two different data centers with incompatible formats (even though they both used CDC machines).
But I hadn't graduated from college at the time you say we should have switched to 9-track, and there was no way we could have even attempted to do so when I first went to work.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Saturday October 28 2017, @02:23AM (2 children)
The System/360 came out in 1964 and it had 9 track tape. The 370 came out in the early '70s. They included the 6250 bpi 9 track tape units It may well be that you didn't have access to one of those, they weren't cheap and a lot of people didn't but they weren't the only machines that could access a 9 track (of any density).
Of course, no computer gear was actually cheap in the early '70s.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday October 28 2017, @05:10AM (1 child)
Yes. That's probably the way it was. But without access to a 9-Track drive the claim that we should convert our programs to use them is...unreasonable.
There is, of course, the additional problem that we were using a custom system that only worked on the IBM 7094... That, however, shouldn't affect the Census Bureau, which apparently just didn't have procedures in place to keep computer records updated. *We* didn't have that option, but they should have...but they were concentrating on the next census, and apparently they were still thinking that the paper records were the real data, and even of those they only kept summaries, because it would otherwise have been overwhelming in quantity. So, AFAIK, even now the only records from the 1960 census are processed summaries...because even parity 800bpi tapes were unreadable. (OTOH, that may be where I made a mistake...perhaps the original tapes were 556bpi or 200bpi...but they were even parity.)
But my take-away message still seems correct: If you have important data that you need to keep as an archival record, don't just keep multiple copies, keep it in multiple formats.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Saturday October 28 2017, @06:19AM
If you didn't have access to the appropriate next generation of storage, you were under-funded for your mission. Archiving isn't a fire and forget activity. That wasn't your fault, but it was a problem. In general, I do agree with you that multiple copies in multiple formats is a good way to maximize the odds of retrieving the data later.
(Score: 2) by forkazoo on Friday October 27 2017, @09:59PM
LTO is specced for two generations of backwards compatibility on reads, and I have done LTO-2 on LTO-4 hardware, and LTO-4 on LTO-6 hardware. If you need older than that, there's always ebay. LTO is extremely common (by the standards of that sort of high end Enterprise gear) so I am not worried about being able to find working drives a decade from now.
That said, you should always plan on migrating to newer media after a few years. That should just be a party of the standard operations. Once you have a Petavyte on a room full of LTO-4, you can upgrade to an LTO-6, and shrink down your archive to one rack of LTO-6 tapes and make room for all the new LTO-6 tapes you'll make over the next few years. Then, repeat when you migrate everything to a small number of LTO-8's a few years later. If keeping the archive alive isn't a part of the plan, it serves little purpose regardless of what format you store it on.
(Score: 1) by Roger Murdock on Sunday October 29 2017, @11:23PM
You should be writing your data to newer media every few years to avoid exactly that problem, regardless of what media you've chosen. You could have saved yourself a lot of typing there.