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from the as-opposed-to-non-linear-tape? dept.
The Linear Tape-Open market is stable:
The LTO Program Technology Provider Companies (TPCs)—Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM and Quantum—today released their annual tape media shipment report, detailing quarterly and year-over-year shipments.
The report shows a record 96,000 petabytes (PB) of total compressed tape capacity shipped in 2016, an increase of 26.1 percent over the previous year. Greater LTO-7 tape technology density as well as the continuous growth in LTO-6 tape technology shipments were key contributors to this increase.
[...] While the total compressed tape capacity grew dramatically in 2016, the total volume of tape cartridges shipped in 2016 remained flat over the previous year whereas hard disk drives (HDD) saw a decrease in unit sales of approximately 9.5 percent year-over-year2. This stability in tape cartridge shipments indicates that customers continue to rely on low-cost, high-density tape as part of their current data protection and retention strategies and evolving tape technologies are becoming attractive to new areas of the market.
"Compressed tape capacity" is a nonsense number that multiplies the "raw" capacity by a compression ratio. Assuming that only LTO-6 and LTO-7 tapes were sold (which have a 2.5:1 compression ratio rather than the 2:1 of earlier generations), then 38,400 PB or 38.4 exabytes were shipped.
LTO-6 tapes store 2.5 TB and LTO-7 tapes store 6 TB. Planned LTO-8 tapes will store 12.8 TB, LTO-9 will store 26 TB, and LTO-10 will store 48 TB. The max uncompressed speed of these generations will be 160, 300, 427, 708, and 1100 MB/s respectively.
(Score: 1) by Sourcery42 on Wednesday April 19 2017, @06:03PM (25 children)
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday April 19 2017, @06:12PM (21 children)
Both Samsung and SanDisk have 256 GB MicroSD cards. I'm sure a lot more than 24 of those could fit in the volume of an LTO-7 tape. By the time LTO-10 comes out, the 2 TB barrier for both full size SD and MicroSD will have been long broken.
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(Score: 2) by EvilSS on Wednesday April 19 2017, @06:23PM (12 children)
Of course they are so tiny the could be lost. Maybe it could also put them in plastic eggs for transport.
(Score: 2) by PinkyGigglebrain on Wednesday April 19 2017, @06:46PM (2 children)
That is actually a really good idea. You might want to print your comment, flesh it out with some extra notes about how you think it would work then get it notarized. May not be as good as a patent but it would show you published the idea first and might at least be able to get some credit for it.
I've seen tape changers made out of legos. What you describe wouldn't be that far off the basic design, though the gripper for the microSD cards would likely have to built out something other than legos due to the size of the card.
"Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Snow on Wednesday April 19 2017, @06:54PM (1 child)
Just add the electrical contacts to the arm, then the arm can just sit on the sd card, while the sd card remains fixed in place.
Although, I gotta say, I REALLY like the egg idea. And the eggs should be just piled up at random, with a robotic claw dangling from the top.
(Score: 4, Funny) by sjames on Wednesday April 19 2017, @07:05PM
Dammit! I just deleted the annual report, got a quarter?
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday April 19 2017, @08:47PM (8 children)
When I was just a kid starting out the "major financial services company" I worked for had 10, 20, 30 thousand tapes of financial records but only I believe four of the half million dollar fridge sized tape drives, so it was financially viable to fire the tape ops, sell two of the tape drives and install a $10M (or whatever it was) tape robot to keep the drives busy.
Anyway the point was the tapes were "cheap" and the drives were "expensive" so they went to insane lengths to move tapes in and out of drives.
The problem with SDXC cards is the cheapest reader I can find on Amazon is $6 which means I could buy a shipping crate of a million of them for $3 whereas the cheapest SDXC amazon offers at 128G level is around $80. So theres no point in storing "cheap" $80 cards offline to save the purchase of "expensive" $3 readers.
Really I'm merely justifying how bad I want to set up a striped mirrored ZFS pool across a couple thousand USB3 connected flash cards.
It is interesting to think about that a couple years back I set up my dual mirrored 256G desktops (left and right) on my work desk at home and I've been loving feeebsd ZFS for some years on that, but now I can get 256G flash memory for a mere $200 each. I could replace those desktops with rasp-pi pretty soon, lets say 2019 pi.
(Score: 2) by Snow on Wednesday April 19 2017, @09:09PM (1 child)
Designing a system with 1,000,000 (or even 1,000) sdxc readers would be non-trivial.
Although I did find this card that connects to the sata bus: http://the-gadgeteer.com/2016/03/17/turn-10-micro-sd-cards-into-a-sata-ssd-drive/ [the-gadgeteer.com]
I suppose you could just scale that idea up to a card that holds 100 or more. Then you have a problem with the management/inventory of the individual cards and replacement as they fail. It honestly sounds like a constant pain in the ass.
Could you imagine walking into a place on your first day, and someone drops a milk crate filled with sd cards on your desk. "Oh, this is our backup solution. Someone found that we could save 30% by using sd cards."
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday April 19 2017, @09:28PM
Well, look at NAS vendors, if you got the cash they'll build anything that can be imagined, even build things that shouldn't be imagined.
Without the size constraint of drives, you could put thousands of cards in something the size of a dorm fridge. In fact I wouldn't even use cards and slots I'd just solder a couple flash chips to a FPGA and connect the FPGAs in some peculiar manner and write software to route around failing chips, or go board level replacement.
Its an interesting thought experiment to manufacture a device that stores a petabyte. Thats only 4000 cards, so 40 cards holding 10 x 10 array. With multilayer boards and BGA packaging I bet that each card would be bigger than a business card but smaller than a postcard. A couple dozen could fit in a shoebox?
For offsite backup each card would hold 25 TB which is 10 LTO-6 tapes. Each card would cost about $10K maybe. Of course you could reuse it and the speed of writing would be limited almost solely to what you could plug it into, imagine writing to 64 cards in parallel with plenty of parity-recovery bits because you got 100 chips on board.
(Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Wednesday April 19 2017, @10:00PM (3 children)
Two problems [sdcard.org]:
The SDXC standard requires the proprietary exFAT filesystem and a modified version of CPRM (with device revocation).
You can try a non-standard FS like ZFS, but YMMV.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday April 20 2017, @01:28AM
I've formatted many USB thumb drives and SD-Cards as good old ext4 without a problem.
The standard controls what is needed to use the word SDXC, not what you actually do with the device.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by EvilSS on Thursday April 20 2017, @08:55AM (1 child)
(Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Thursday April 20 2017, @03:21PM
I think Samsung already did with Universal Flash Storage/a [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by EvilSS on Thursday April 20 2017, @08:58AM (1 child)
(Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday April 23 2017, @01:31PM
Presumably there's some ISO/DIN standard for safe deposit box sizes and you'd likely get something that size like an 80s home computer or video game cartridge except this just a bit smaller than a safe deposit box contains hundreds, thousands, maybe 10s of thousands of the flash chips.
You'd buy your backup devices to fit your rotation plans.
I would not be surprised to see a standard size picked as per above and depending on how many TB you need, the box contains somewhere between a couple and hundreds of flash chips.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Wednesday April 19 2017, @07:03PM
And they'll only cost twice as much as the tape and require a robot to swap them.
Possibly a good option for use at home or a small office, but when you have a lot of data, the tape is better proven, more convenient, and cheaper.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday April 19 2017, @08:37PM
Yes, microSD cards do have a very high data density, however they also cost a lot more I'm pretty sure, in a $/GB sense. The advantage of LTO tape is that it's really cheap for the cartridges, compared to other storage technologies. The disadvantage is that it requires a really, really expensive drive (whereas USB hard drives and SD/microSD cards don't require any special hardware at all usually, as modern computers usually have the needed ports built-in).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 19 2017, @10:07PM (1 child)
Tape lasts and lasts. I've had about 3 - 5 SD cards fail on me after too many write operations. They don't just backup data and leave it sitting, the tapes get re-used to give you a *current* backup. MTWTF MTWTF and then repeat.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday April 20 2017, @02:39AM
I never said that SD cards were a better backup than tape. But if you want high station wagon or 747 bandwidth, MicroSD is much denser.
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(Score: 1) by Roger Murdock on Thursday April 20 2017, @01:02AM (3 children)
Sustained write speed for MicroSD cards has a long way to go before it will catch up the 1052 Gb/hour of lto7. I think that's the main reason behind tape's durability in the market.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday April 20 2017, @01:42AM (1 child)
Write speed can be really fast on tape.
Read can take forever.
Back in the late 90s we were backing up to LT? tapes, and had tons of tapes that we cycled religiously.
Too small of an operation to have a tape-arm. Just a large fireproof safe in another room.
Numbered slots. Numbered tapes, with digitally numbered headers.
We virtually never retrieved anything from the tapes. No need.
But any time we did is was a Chinese fire-drill.
It was usually from the most recent tape, and that mostly worked.
The few times we had to really reach back to old tapes they couldn't be read.
Or they had so many errors it they had to be babysat just to find the files.
We finally went through the tapes and read checked every on of them and found out any tape older than 18 months had a 50-50 chance of a read error. (And don't get me started on tape drive longevity or interchangeability!)
Tape sucks.
In the best of installations tape sucks.
In the minimalist installations tape sucks.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Thursday April 20 2017, @12:05PM
On whichever medium, data needs to be kept fresh. No exceptions, only variations to the theme. Here is how google does it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNliOm9NtCM [youtube.com]
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Thursday April 20 2017, @08:06AM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 1) by DannyB on Wednesday April 19 2017, @07:53PM (2 children)
But not so good for low latency applications.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 19 2017, @09:16PM (1 child)
Latency problems? Upgrade to a Bugatti Veyron!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 20 2017, @01:29AM
Good luck finding a station wagon these days...still a few on the USA market, but most of the big car companies serve that market with minivans or suv's now. Which sucks--I like wagons that mostly drive like a normal car...and hold a bit more.