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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: 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.