Exadrive still not enough? Got you covered - New IBM/FujiFilm 580TB Magnet tape

[williamcll]

At 32 times LTO-9 and 1225 meters long, it is the biggest piece of sequential storage ever made. No mention on how fast it can read/Write however.

Quote

IBM has announced a breakthrough in cooperation with Fujifilm to set a new world record for tape storage. The two companies are now able to achieve a storage capacity of 317 gigabytes per square inch. The massive capacity was reached on a prototype strontium ferrite particulate magnetic tape developed by Fujifilm. Fujifilm’s massive 317 gigabytes per square inch capacity is 27 times more than the areal density in current state-of-the-art commercial tape drives. The new storage allows a single tape cartridge to store 580 terabytes of data. IBM puts the capacity in perspective, noting that 580 terabytes is equivalent to 786,977 CDs stacked 944 meters high.

Current generation magnetic tape uses barium ferrite particles on the magnetic tape storage media. Fujifilm went to the chemistry lab to invent the Strontium Ferrite particles used on the new tape providing superior properties with higher density storage for the same amount of tape. Along with new particles, new technologies were also developed to achieve the record, including a low-friction tape head. The low friction tape head enables the use of very smooth tape media. A new detector to allow reliable data detection on the new media was created at a linear density of 702 Kbpi when the data is read back on a narrow 29 nm wide TMR read sensor. Fujifilm also created a new set of servo controllers that help maintain the precise position of the read/write heads relative to the tape using the head actuator. Those new servos enabled head positioning and accuracy of 3.2 nm, which is a world record.

 

Source: https://www.ibm.com/blogs/research/2020/12/tape-density-record/

https://www.fujifilm.com/news/n201216_01.html

https://www.slashgear.com/fujifilm-and-ibm-create-new-magnetic-tape-with-580tb-capacity-16651350/
Thoughts: That is pretty big and hefty, though spec wise it doesn't seem to be a lot better than the sputtered media tape of 2017, which seemed to have a higher data density. I can see that IBM or sony would try to go for a single petabyte per drive within the next 3 years.

[WhitetailAni]

I bet it will have 1 bit per second speeds.

[FloRolf]

3 minutes ago, ragnarok0273 said:

I bet it will have 1 bit per second speeds.

I guess the speeds aren't even that bad, but the access times, oh Boi. 

[pythonmegapixel]

9 minutes ago, FloRolf said:

I guess the speeds aren't even that bad, but the access times, oh Boi. 

You're missing the point of tape storage...

[Drama Lama]

enough for 2 call of duty games

[Drama Lama]

12 minutes ago, FloRolf said:

I guess the speeds aren't even that bad, but the access times, oh Boi. 

the read and write speed of tape isn't that bad but the problems that make it only usable as archival storage are extremly slow random reads and writes and that it can only be overwitten a few times until it breaks. Oh and I almost forgott the extremely expensive tape recorders so it's only a good option for enterprise solutions

[FloRolf]

25 minutes ago, pythonmegapixel said:

You're missing the point of tape storage...

Thanks Sherlock.... 

[CarlBar]

11 hours ago, Drama Lama said:

the read and write speed of tape isn't that bad but the problems that make it only usable as archival storage are extremly slow random reads and writes and that it can only be overwitten a few times until it breaks. Oh and I almost forgott the extremely expensive tape recorders so it's only a good option for enterprise solutions

 

Well the readers are probably expensive because all the other issues limit it to enterprise on their own. 

[RejZoR]

11 hours ago, Drama Lama said:

enough for 2 call of duty games

Until one of them gets an update. Then you have to uninstall the other one to gain some space...

[XWAUForceflow]

13 hours ago, Drama Lama said:

the read and write speed of tape isn't that bad but the problems that make it only usable as archival storage are extremly slow random reads and writes and that it can only be overwitten a few times until it breaks. Oh and I almost forgott the extremely expensive tape recorders so it's only a good option for enterprise solutions

Overwritten a few times? Where do you get that? I mean we are talking enterprise level quality here. I mean sure, you won't be overwriting the tapes thousands of times (if you do, you are using your tapes wrong) but in general usage you do not have to worry about the tape breaking. Biggest risk you have (and the reason why you should always have two copies of your data on different tapes) is that the drive will have an issue and destroy the tape. But even that risk is very, very low. (In my time handling backup tapes we had a handful of failures for thousands of tapes with hundreds of thousands of mounts...)

[Doobeedoo]

Cool. Huge and long.

 

 

 

Don't.

[Drama Lama]

2 hours ago, XWAUForceflow said:

I mean sure, you won't be overwriting the tapes thousands of times (if you do, you are using your tapes wrong) but in general usage you do not have to worry about the tape breaking.

yes of if you use it as archival storage you won't run into this problem. The point I wanted to make is that tape is unusable as a normal drive where data gets written and editet all the time

[leadeater]

16 hours ago, ragnarok0273 said:

I bet it will have 1 bit per second speeds.

Tape read and write speeds are extremely high, you just can't do random I/O on them. 

 

Current generation LTO-9 does 400 MB/s uncompressed and 1000MB/s compressed, in a tape library with 8 drives like we have (LTO-7 currently) you'll have problems with network bandwidth and source disk performance speeds, not the tape speed. That's why you multi-stream and multiplex to tape drives to make sure the incoming data stream is actually fast enough to run the tape drive at full speed and prevent scrubbing.

[leadeater]

1 hour ago, Drama Lama said:

yes of if you use it as archival storage you won't run into this problem. The point I wanted to make is that tape is unusable as a normal drive where data gets written and editet all the time

But that's not even a target use case for tapes.

[leadeater]

3 hours ago, XWAUForceflow said:

But even that risk is very, very low. (In my time handling backup tapes we had a handful of failures for thousands of tapes with hundreds of thousands of mounts...)

I have never dropped a tape, honest 

[Drama Lama]

1 hour ago, leadeater said:

But that's not even a target use case for tapes.

then please tell me ( I don't want to sound rude I'm really interested in this stuff want to learn more ) I only know of tape as backup medium ( mostly in the enterprise sector ) and sometimes storage for large less frequently accessed databases ( usually science research )

 

[leadeater]

17 minutes ago, Drama Lama said:

then please tell me ( I don't want to sound rude I'm really interested in this stuff want to learn more ) I only know of tape as backup medium ( mostly in the enterprise sector ) and sometimes storage for large less frequently accessed databases ( usually science research )

 

You were correct, I was just saying that tape isn't targeted for anything but archive and backup storage. It's not really that much of a negative point towards tapes as it's not designed or marketed for any usage other than archive/backup.

 

It's a bit like saying a Lamborghini Huracan is a bad vehicle to tow a tailor, while you could it was never made to do that. Fun fact, people have done just that, towing a tailor with a Huracan lol.

[Drama Lama]

21 minutes ago, leadeater said:

's a bit like saying a Lamborghini Huracan is a bad vehicle to tow a tailor, while you could it was never made to do that. Fun fact, people have done just that, towing a tailor with a Huracan lol.

well the yacht isn't gonna tow itself

tape would be good for consumers if the recorders weren't so  super expensive

[XWAUForceflow]

4 hours ago, leadeater said:

I have never dropped a tape, honest 

would NEVER do that! Luckily I never had to do too much of the actual handling. Though I once had to move about 200 tapes from one library to the other in a fairly short amount of time. Good thing was that we actually had proper boxes that would perfectly fit the tapes inside. Much less chance to drop and damage something then.

 

We had some issues with tapedrives shredding tapes, but luckily that is also a rare occurrence. Though we only ever use enterprise level stuff, either StorageTek drives and later the IBM series. (The TS1150 are beasts) We heard some bad stories about the early LTO generations, luckily we never had to suffer through those.

[unsorted]

Upgrade DVD-RAM (in cartridges) to reasonable read/write speeds and 1TB capacity. Alternatively, upgrade any existing cool magento-optical technology like Hi-MD / MiniDisc to reasonable read/write with 1TB capacity. MiniDisc/Hi-MD still has the sexiest cartridge design I've ever seen.

 

I would like 1TB per disc.

$200 recorders

$20 discs.

 

I ask for nothing more for the next decade. You will do this, Japanese storage kings. You will. Because you want it too.

 

Let the boring enterprise have tape and racks of hard drives.

 

[leadeater]

39 minutes ago, Sakuriru said:

To put things in perspective, that means they would need 1725 of these tapes to store all of their data.

I'm fairly sure they will already have a lot more tapes than that already, we used to have 1500 tapes. I know a certain digital effects and prop making company, that everyone knows of, here that has way more tapes than this. Movie budgets, they are huge and they use a crap ton of data.

[XWAUForceflow]

11 hours ago, Sakuriru said:

There's a lot of scientific pursuits that use tapes to store data. One of the most notable examples is the LHC, which are projected to need 1 Exabyte of storage very soon. To put things in perspective, that means they would need 1725 of these tapes to store all of their data.

Honestly in enterprise terms that's nothing. At the height of our time we had 10 (or was it 12, cannot remember) STK Powderhorn tape libraries. That's up to 6,000 tapes per library. So we easily had 50,000 tapes accessible online at all times. (Plus some archival storage where the tapes actually were removed, though that was not very common)

 

It really all depends on what you want to do. If you don't need random write/read access and instant accessibility tape can be the best solution for you. Modern tape drives can easily read and write at above 400MB/s (compressed data more like 900MB/s) and mount and seek times aren't as bad anymore. So for backup and restore as well as archive or rare access (like a seasonal archive that you know will only be accessed once a year) it's a really cost effective way to do things. One big advantage of tape is that once it's written it uses zero power and as such produces zero heat. Both of which can be quite a cost factor in the long run if you don't really need to access your data often or sometimes even at all. (I'd say 99,9% of the backups we write will never be accessed again, if not more)

 

And in times of hackers and crypto-viruses the air-gap is something one really should consider. Overwriting a tape is much harder to do than it is to encrypt an online disk. Even a disgruntled employee will have a much harder time to destroy your tape storage whereas destroying any sort of online disk storage is much easier. Yes there are solutions that make this much, much harder these days, but those tend to add a lot of additional work and costs into the mix.

 

Tape is not the end-all be-all solution for storage, but it's a very effective additional tool one should consider in their professional IT environment. Sadly it's not really a solution that is suitable for the end-user, but I personally am looking forward to those new tapes

[leadeater]

49 minutes ago, XWAUForceflow said:

Tape is not the end-all be-all solution for storage, but it's a very effective additional tool one should consider in their professional IT environment

But tape is dead, cloud is the future!

 

 

(While everyone pretends and ignores that a lot of cold storage cloud options are tapes which is why they have recall SLAs)