[HN Gopher] 50TB IBM tape drive more than doubles LTO-9 capacity
___________________________________________________________________
50TB IBM tape drive more than doubles LTO-9 capacity
Author : voxadam
Score : 119 points
Date : 2023-08-25 12:36 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blocksandfiles.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blocksandfiles.com)
| vlovich123 wrote:
| What's the point of reporting compressed capacity? Isn't data
| typically compressed at rest, negating any value of the disk
| doing it?
| nikanj wrote:
| Bigger number for marketing
| vardump wrote:
| Purely legacy, that's how it's always been reported.
| antientropic wrote:
| Because nobody has yet bothered to sue them for false
| advertising, so they continue to get away with it.
| tux3 wrote:
| It takes advantage of shallow purchasing decisions.
|
| If all your competitors report 30 TB*, and you report 15 TB,
| you may have a better product, but what the people with
| purchasing power want is bigger numbers, and you advertise a
| lower number
|
| *with 3:1 compression
| osigurdson wrote:
| If so, why not state 100:1 compression on the canonical FF*N
| data set.
| bombcar wrote:
| Because all the companies have to do it in lockstep (see
| "reach vs standout" recently in tape measures).
| tux3 wrote:
| Because contrary to popular belief, people are only
| finitely foolish
|
| But in fact this did happen to some extent. LTO tapes used
| to advertise with 2:1 compression ratio. Then that became
| 2.5:1. And now IBM is doing 3:1
|
| And that's not because we just discovered how to improve on
| Lempel-Ziv. The switch to 2.5:1 was around 2012. LZMA is
| 20th century tech, and people still use gzip today.
| Compression technology doesn't account for the advertising
| number inflation there.
| Johnny555 wrote:
| Back when I still managed an LTO tape library (which was way
| back when LTO-4 was state of the art), our data was encrypted
| before writing it, also negating any compression. And back then
| the compression ratio was advertised as 2:1, not 3:1.
| VectorLock wrote:
| This was before the introduction of the much lauded "Middle
| Out" compression.
| csydas wrote:
| After having helped on a lot of tape storage implementations, I
| get why it's useful for quick estimates on backup solutions.
|
| Compression really is a game changer when you're over a certain
| amount of data you need to protect, and backup technology does
| some really clever space savings at basically all stages,
| making it hard to find a good and easy metric to help sell to
| management. It's a lot easier to tell management:
|
| "These tapes hold 50 TB of production data, and we have about
| 45 TB in production. Backups and restores will be faster, we'll
| have fewer tapes to manage for backups"
|
| than it is to explain the different types of data you need to
| move to tape, the expected compression ratio, etc.
|
| That being said, I do agree they market it too much and it gets
| confusing, as it should only be a reference for implementation
| and quick calculations.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > "These tapes hold 50 TB of production data, and we have
| about 45 TB in production. Backups and restores will be
| faster, we'll have fewer tapes to manage for backups"
|
| Sure, if "production" means database. Which is sometimes
| sensible and sometimes extremely far off.
|
| > than it is to explain the different types of data you need
| to move to tape, the expected compression ratio, etc.
|
| To some extent, but you mostly just need two numbers.
| Database capacity and photo/video/audio capacity.
| ta1243 wrote:
| Surely how well it compresses depends on the material you're
| backing up
|
| It seems they went all in on the "compressed" value after
| missing the doubling of the real space in LTO6.
| sebazzz wrote:
| Especially if you backup encrypted data (which isn't
| unusual - to have data encrypted at rest) you will have a
| compression ratio of 100% or even more (metadata of the
| compression needs to be stored too)
| monocasa wrote:
| The drives will do encryption too so that you don't have
| to pick between encryption at rest and compression.
| sebazzz wrote:
| From the SSL world we know that encrypting compressed
| data can lead to vulnerabilities in the encryption. Does
| that nog apply here?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRIME?wprov=sfti1
| monocasa wrote:
| It doesn't really apply as both CRIME and BREACH rely on
| small N on the payload size, and heavy use of repeated
| chosen plaintexts to iterate through the secret state
| space.
| lovasoa wrote:
| Isn't it harder when you have to later report to management
| that actually, your 45TB of production data do not fit on the
| 50TB tape ?
|
| I suppose compression ratios vary a lot between users of
| these things, right ? And if you are backing up user-
| generated data, you don't know in advance how well it will
| compress.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| In this case "The latest TS1170 drive supports 50TB JF
| media cartridges with 150TB compressed capacity through 3:1
| compression"
|
| So looks like 50TB raw if I am reading this right.
|
| For these sorts of solutions you are usually not using just
| 1 tape. The tape is the cheap part. The drives cost a
| decent amount though. So in your case if the data does not
| fit. You buy another tape and pop it into the existing
| drive and finish the backup. Also you would have some sort
| of rotation schedule and at least a few dozen tapes. If you
| are doing it right offsite and onsite rotation too. An
| extra tape in the mix of that is not something they would
| worry about. When I did this for a small org I had the
| weekends to do a full backup of all of our computers. Then
| during the week I would do incrementals. At the end of the
| week I would ship off the prev week to an offsite and start
| the next full backup. Not perfect but gave us a onsite 1
| day return offsite (building gone) 1 week out. The offsite
| would keep about 6 months of tapes and return them about
| once a month.
| pstuart wrote:
| In the previous century we'd restore the production tape
| backups to a "production playground" that verified the
| backup actually worked as well as give a production-like
| testing environment.
| klodolph wrote:
| Yeah. For most operations, you pay for drive throughput &
| redundancy, and the actual storage itself is "too cheap
| to meter".
|
| Except when it isn't, but those customers know who they
| are.
| dylan604 wrote:
| These are the same customers that only make 1 tape of the
| data. One facility I was at required 3 copies written by
| 3 different writers. These were in large robot operated
| units, so it was all automated by our front end. One copy
| stayed locally, the other 2 went to 2 different offsite
| locations in different parts of the country with the
| closest being in another town across state. Each tape had
| to be removed from the writer and placed into a different
| drive to do a read back for comparison. In the LTO4 days,
| we would catch lots of write errors like this. I wonder
| if the newer formats are any better about these errors?
| How I miss the old days of tar/mt commands, er, no, who
| am I kidding!
| bluGill wrote:
| Odds are you already have a backup system and so you know
| from experience with your old system how much compression
| you really get.
| Johnny555 wrote:
| >After having helped on a lot of tape storage
| implementations, I get why it's useful for quick estimates on
| backup solutions.
|
| Can't you just do that estimate in your head? If you know
| your data mostly text and has a 3:1 compression ratio, when
| you buy your tapes you can multiply the raw capacity by 3, if
| it's mostly compressed images (i.e. gif, jpg, etc), you're
| probably not going see much compression at all.
|
| Does going with some tape drive manufacturer's estimate
| really help you?
| dylan604 wrote:
| Not once in my days of using tape storage have I ever enabled
| compression, so it always seems like a waste to my specific
| use case of storing large files of media formats,
| specifically video. Unless the video was in some sort of RAW
| uncompressed format, which is close to never, and video in a
| CoDec would not benefit from this compression.
| leptons wrote:
| Tape compression is probably not meant for your use cases,
| it's likely meant for large government institutions or
| corporations that generate petabytes of uncompressed text
| data a week - so instead of needing to manage compression
| as a separate process, the tape drive just does it without
| any other processing needed. The data can go from
| collection/creation to long-term storage without any other
| steps in between. For some organizations that's a big win.
| For the average home user backing up their plex, it might
| seem unnecessary.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Lots of home users backing up their Plex with an LTO5 or
| greater are there?
| bombcar wrote:
| tank compressratio 1.14x -
| tank/backup compressratio 1.43x -
| tank/movies compressratio 1.01x -
| tank/music compressratio 1.01x -
|
| As you can see, my actual file backups (servers and
| clients) compressed somewhat, but movies and music I got
| nothing (this is from ZFS but tape compression will be
| similar).
| hosteur wrote:
| > The new tape cartridge media, also called 3592 70F, uses
| Strontium Ferrite particle technology.
|
| If anyone else is wondering if this is radioactive, it likely
| isn't.
|
| > While natural strontium (which is mostly the isotope
| strontium-88) is stable, the synthetic strontium-90 is
| radioactive and is one of the most dangerous components of
| nuclear fallout, as strontium is absorbed by the body in a
| similar manner to calcium. Natural stable strontium, on the other
| hand, is not hazardous to health.
| tzs wrote:
| If you knew you were going to exposed to nuclear fallout could
| you ingest a lot of natural strontium to minimize the amount of
| strontium-90 your body could absorb?
| adrian_b wrote:
| Natural strontium not only is not radioactive but it is one of
| the elements with the most stable nuclei (compared to their
| neighbors), together with barium, tin and lead, because they
| have "magic" numbers of neutrons or of protons.
|
| Because of this, strontium is one of the most abundant elements
| in the universe, among those that are heavier than the elements
| of the iron peak, i.e. among the elements that cannot be
| produced by fusion, in stars.
|
| There are various living beings which use either salts of
| strontium or salts of barium for their skeletons, instead of
| the more common salts of calcium (because the salts of Sr and
| Ba, especially the sulfates, are less soluble than the
| corresponding salts of Ca).
|
| In magnetic tapes, either barium ferrite or strontium ferrite
| are preferred to ferromagnetic metals that have been used in
| the past, because they already are oxides, so they cannot be
| oxidized by the air, which enables long lifetimes for the
| magnetic tapes, of at least thirty years.
| bhewes wrote:
| I second quakeguy, great reply; love seeing material science
| on HN.
| quakeguy wrote:
| Awesome reply, thx!
| dylan604 wrote:
| >In magnetic tapes, either barium ferrite or strontium
| ferrite are preferred to ferromagnetic metals that have been
| used in the past, because they already are oxides, so they
| cannot be oxidized by the air, which enables long lifetimes
| for the magnetic tapes, of at least thirty years.
|
| This was very interesting. I quit paying attention to tape
| formulations decades ago, but even when paying attention, I
| only knew of the names vs actually knowing this level of
| detail.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| In fact, small amounts of strontium seem to be good for your
| bones
|
| https://www.webmd.com/osteoporosis/strontium-treatment-osteo...
| chaps wrote:
| Erm, that webmd article you linked is for strontium, not
| strontium ferrite -- Sr vs SrO6Fe2O3.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| that might be because the post they responded to was also
| talking about elemental strontium:
|
| _> While natural strontium (which is mostly the isotope
| strontium-88) is stable, the synthetic strontium-90 is_
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Someone that's worried about radioactivity is talking about
| the atoms. And so is the webmd article.
|
| Zero mismatch.
| BenjiWiebe wrote:
| Not saying strontium ferrite is good for you, but remember
| that when we talk about sodium intake or iron intake or
| whatever, that includes multiple different forms of those,
| not including the pure metal. That article actually
| mentions two different forms of strontium and hints at
| others.
| chaps wrote:
| That's fair and I was curious if the same thing would
| happen here. But this definitely isn't my domain :)
|
| In any case, here's a lovely FDA safety data sheet of
| strontium ferrite. It... uh.. apparently doesn't cause
| pain when rubbed into the eyes of rabbits and guinea
| pigs. No LD50 tests were taken for the sheet though, so
| that's bittersweet I guess.
|
| https://www.advancedenergy.com/globalassets/non-resource-
| lib...
| Thev00d00 wrote:
| 400MBps transfer speed means it would take 1 day, 14hours to fill
| it...
| izzydata wrote:
| That seems pretty good honestly for its intended use case.
| anfractuosity wrote:
| Yeah that seems surprisingly good as I thought the write
| speeds I get from a spinning disk is around 100MB/s or less.
| helf wrote:
| 100MB/s or less? Are you using SMR 5400rpm disks? I
| routinely get 180-220MB/s throughput _per_ Exos drive.
| anfractuosity wrote:
| I just ran - dd if=/dev/zero of=tmp.img
| bs=1G count=1 oflag=dsync
|
| And got - 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB, 1.0 GiB) copied,
| 9.49586 s, 113 MB/s
|
| The drive appears to be - WDC WD160EDGZ-11B2DA0, it's a
| 16TB disk, which I thought would be SMR, due to its size,
| but maybe I'm wrong.
|
| Just found https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/
| qf5ar3/is_this... which seems to indicate it's CMR.
| tguvot wrote:
| tape libraries (even small) can have multiple drives in same 6U
| chassis. you can link multiple chassis together to build bigger
| system.
| t90fan wrote:
| thats great for tape
|
| only marginally slower than your average SSD
| nayuki wrote:
| That's in the same ballpark as HDDs. It takes me ~24 hours to
| fill an 18 TB HDD.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| Since SATA/NL-SAS eaten up the lower tier of the enterprise
| HDDs you never write to the tape directly, it's always D2D2T.
| jonatron wrote:
| At what scale does tape begin to make financial sense?
| lizknope wrote:
| Above 300TB it starts to make sense to buy an LTO-9 drive
| ($4,500) and tapes ($120 each for 18TB)
|
| Right now you can get 18TB drives for $290 so you can get 306TB
| for $4,930
| comboy wrote:
| I use it at home for offline backup. You can get LTO-6 pretty
| cheap and big chunk of my backup is just things I want to keep
| indefinitely. You can put tapes in multiple locations easily
| and not worry for 20 years.
|
| If you just want to store lots of data in a single place I
| think MAID still beats the tape at any scale (especially if you
| want automated retrieval)
| copperx wrote:
| Is there an LTO-6 tape drive that is, say, less than a
| thousand dollars? All tape drives I've seen are between 2-4k
| USD.
| vGPU wrote:
| Used, yes.
| comboy wrote:
| I bought an used one (HP Ultirum 6250), you should be able
| to get it under $1000, closer to $500, but I recommend
| getting it with the controller so that you know there are
| no issues. Note that these controllers are made to be
| mounted inside heavily ventilated rack case, so if you are
| putting it inside desktop PC I suggest making sure some fan
| blows on it.
|
| It's discouraging that it's so complicated which made me
| back out of the purchase a few times, but it was well worth
| it.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Once you fill shelves with them.
|
| The tape itself is quite cheap (LTO-9 is 18TB for $100), but
| the drives are expensive ($5000+ for an LTO-9 drive), so you
| need quite a bit of volume to make it worth it.
|
| You can get an earlier breakeven point by buying used equipment
| for older generations. But no matter what you do, at small
| scale hard drives will be cheaper (and can be put on a shelf or
| in a safe too)
| pjdesno wrote:
| We've got a 9-drive system with a table robot between two
| aisles of tapes, the whole thing is maybe 8" by 20". It
| definitely makes sense at that scale.
| dd82 wrote:
| when you need long term stable storage without getting hit by
| bit rot
| aspyct wrote:
| Pretty sure it's not immune to bit rot.
|
| Have any data to back your claim?
| rout39574 wrote:
| Immune, no. Far less prone to bit rot? yeah. My source is
| running backups for a significant fraction of a large
| univiersity for ~20 years. We had a routine cadence of tape
| errors, which were much less frequent than our routine
| cadence of disk replacement.
|
| I suppose that's anecdote. :) But it's what I've got.
| perbu wrote:
| Tape drives will, when writing, re-read the data as it is
| written to make sure no errors are written and will
| transparently correct any errors. In addition, quite a bit
| of error correcting code is written, making it possible to
| correct simple errors.
|
| So perhaps not 100% immune, but partial immunity to bit-rot
| is a pretty important part of the LTO spec.
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _Have any data to back your claim?_
|
| Search for "year" in the specification of HPE's Ultrium LTO
| media:
|
| * https://www.hpe.com/psnow/doc/c04154430
|
| Or IBM's white paper:
|
| * https://www.ibm.com/downloads/cas/Z3RYV0BR
| guerby wrote:
| So 30 years for HPE when stored in appropriate
| himidity/temperature range.
| barelyauser wrote:
| If it didn't (for someone) then this product would not exist.
| adrian_b wrote:
| I am using tape for archiving my data and the break-even point
| with hard disks, the last time when I have checked, perhaps one
| year ago, was somewhere between 200 TB and 300 TB of stored
| data, after buying a tape drive for about $3000.
|
| For larger amounts of data, the money savings vs. HDDs increase
| quickly.
|
| The break-even point vs. HDDs is lower for long-term archiving
| than for short-term backups, because the lifetime of tapes is
| much longer (it is limited not by the degradation of the tapes
| but only by the risk that compatible tape drives might become
| hard to obtain), so you need multiple HDDs to store data for
| the lifetime of a single tape.
| driverdan wrote:
| Quite large scale. Last time I priced tapes out they were more
| expensive per TB than hard drives.
| aaron695 wrote:
| [dead]
| fidotron wrote:
| Depends on how much data you generate. Even small game studios
| will use them for regular physical offsite backups for
| potential disaster recovery. (In extreme cases we stored
| regular snapshots of dev machines as vmware images).
|
| Essential when data is created faster than the locally
| available internet bandwidth which in media industries is quite
| often.
| perbu wrote:
| If you need the following: - Storing petabytes of data without
| requiring any power. Hard-drives are cheap but each one will
| require quite a bit of power
|
| - Having the data be offline, ie, not available to an attacker
| which somehow managed to take control over your network
|
| - Having the data be in a physical format which can be easily
| put in a safe or in the back of a car when there is a risk of
| flood or fire
|
| - Having data on a media that won't regrade over a period of
| say, 10-30 years. Hard-drives tend to fail
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| I agree with most of that, but taking a server offline isn't
| really harder than pulling tapes out of a library.
|
| And if you replace dead disks every month or two, a non-
| networked server can probably manage more reliability over
| 10-30 years.
| izzydata wrote:
| What stops you from writing data to a spinning disk HDD and
| then unplugging it and putting it in a safe?
| saltminer wrote:
| Mechanical failure [0]. As perbu found out, when moving
| parts are left to sit for years, things can fail. Lube can
| dry up, causing bearings to seize up, actuators to lose
| precision or get completely stuck [1], and the magnetic
| field degrades by 1% per year [2]. Of course, you could get
| lucky w/r/t mechanical issues, as many retro computer
| enthusiasts can attest, but it seems to involve a lot of
| luck, as it only takes tiny defects to cause problems over
| a long enough time-frame that leave half your drives as
| paperweights while the others keep on chugging.
|
| Both of these issues can be largely mitigated by simply
| plugging the HDDs in every year or so and re-writing the
| data (maybe run badblocks while you're at it to ensure the
| drive is still in good health), but, as throw0101a
| mentioned, this takes time and effort.
|
| [0]: https://serverfault.com/a/51893
|
| [1]: https://www.partitionwizard.com/clone-disk/do-hard-
| drives-go...
|
| [2]: https://superuser.com/a/312764
| 3-cheese-sundae wrote:
| Is there a way to force a file system to recommit its
| data?
| jandrese wrote:
| Seems like you could do it by not even mounting the
| filesystem, just read out raw sectors and write them
| back. Like a 3 line program. Maybe if you want to be
| fancy you compare the sectors to some checksums to make
| sure you're not reading corrupt data.
| e12e wrote:
| Any word on SSDs?
| saltminer wrote:
| SSDs may actually worse than HDDs, depending on what NAND
| chips are in use. Although there are no moving parts to
| seize up, they do require an occasional power up because
| they represent data via voltage levels and we have not
| yet found a perfect insulator (meaning they will
| inevitably leak charge), and with QLC being all the rage
| these days (4 bits represented in each cell using one of
| 16 discrete voltage levels), when the voltage levels
| start to degrade, it could easily cause catastrophic bit
| rot.
|
| How long a given SSD will last before losing data depends
| on the chips it is built with. I remember reading that
| Sandisk rates their flash storage as being able to
| survive a year without power (though I read that years
| ago and cannot find a source for it now), though [0] says
| 2-5 years, so technology has likely advanced since I last
| read about this. Either way, you should probably try and
| power up your SSDs at least once a year to keep the cells
| charged. This is less work than to keep an HDD healthy
| for cold storage, but it certainly isn't "set and forget"
| like tapes or optical disks.
|
| Edit: I remember pulling my first SSD, a 60 GB Intel 330,
| from an old laptop and, despite having not been powered
| on for 3 years, it still booted. But that was MLC/DLC
| [1], which only has 4 voltage states, and I only saw that
| it booted, not that all my old data was intact.
|
| [0]: https://www.easeus.com/resource/does-ssd-need-
| power.html
|
| [1]: https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/d
| ocuments...
| e12e wrote:
| Hm. Makes me more sad about the state of zfs in macOS and
| windows - with native encryption and checksums it makes
| for a nice cross-platform fs for external drives...
| comboy wrote:
| Typical reliable offline HDD storage is 2-3 years. For tape
| it's 20-30 years.
| jdhawk wrote:
| Bitrot.
| hulitu wrote:
| The spinning motor might not start after some years of
| inactivity.
| perbu wrote:
| I've got a bunch of video on a harddrive that I put in
| storage 20 years ago. Tried to spin it up again and it just
| makes funny noises.
|
| So, yeah, spinning rust might rust.
| seniorivn wrote:
| its possible to restore it in a data restoration shop, if
| you are interested
| fbnlsr wrote:
| This is what I personally do. I have small needs when it
| comes to backups (< 1TB), so I have one backup that's just
| a regular HDD stored in a drawer, and another one that's on
| a Scaleway cold storage container.
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _What stops you from writing data to a spinning disk HDD
| and then unplugging it and putting it in a safe?_
|
| Manual labour.
|
| There are tape libraries with robots that can take a tape
| out of a slot, put it in a drive, and then put it back
| automatically without humans needing to do anything. If you
| want to move the tapes offsite, there is some manual work
| to move the tapes from the import/export slot to a
| container.
|
| A large library like the StorageTek SL8500 can have up to
| 640 drives, 100'000 tape storage slots, and 2'880
| import/export slots.
| sofixa wrote:
| > Manual labour.
|
| Big cloud providers have disk replacement robots, so it's
| not unfeasible for robots to perform the "unplug and
| store the HDD somewhere".
|
| But another advantage tape has is durability.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Who actually has those?
| jandrese wrote:
| Last time I saw one of those was back when AOL was a big
| shot ISP. They had to buy high power SGI systems to feed
| the things because nothing else had the bus bandwidth to
| support one. I was told that the full rack sized SGI
| system (Origin 2000) was the cheapest part of the entire
| rig.
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _Big cloud providers have disk replacement robots_
| [...]
|
| [citation needed]
| dsr_ wrote:
| Think about tape as an archiving tool, rather than a backup-
| and-restore tool.
|
| (The three major tiers are A: I accidentally deleted a file or
| directory yesterday, so I need to get a copy from snapshots; B:
| the machine I was working on exploded, so I need to rebuild it
| and repopulate it with my data; C: archive for some need in the
| far future)
|
| Suppose you have large quantities of data that you need to
| preserve for legal reasons -- it's always legal reasons, unless
| you are in academia or similar -- but you will not be accessing
| much. That's when you use tapes.
|
| For most other purposes, you want a snapshotting filesystem or
| an offsite filesystem made from those snapshots.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| I think there's a case to be made for a subset of C:
| archiving video originals, film scans, and the like. While
| the humans might work with intermediates ("mezzanine") files,
| the originals are just miserably huge, but you never want to
| lose them.
| khobragade wrote:
| Exactly as Gavin from The Slow Mo Guys describes
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lO-SAzFaN18
| xyst wrote:
| TIL tape drives still exist.
| 6LLvveMx2koXfwn wrote:
| We backup 1.5 PB of data per month to tape; What alternative
| solution would you suggest given 'cloud' in all its guises is
| too expensive?
| comboy wrote:
| I'm surprised HDD don't turn out to be less expensive option
| calculating in all infrastructure + man hours. Do you have a
| ballpark what's percentage cost difference for your use case?
| rtkwe wrote:
| At the PB scale you start running robotic tape machines
| that eliminate much of the human labor involved.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Worth noting that many uses for hard drives are IO limited.
| Ie. you're running a database and keep a few hundred GB of
| hot records in RAM, tens of TB of medium records on SSD,
| and a few PB of rarely accessed records on hard drives.
|
| However, even those rarely accessed records often have more
| accesses per year than the hard drives can support - so you
| are forced to buy 400 drives instead of 200 drives and keep
| each half full.
|
| End result: There is a lot of 'almost free' space on the
| hard drives, as long as you are happy to only read/write
| the data very rarely.
| rtkwe wrote:
| If you're having such an IO bottleneck that you're
| doubling your HDD array to provide the necessary
| throughput how do you actually run backups or restores
| using those disks? Do you hope you only need it in off
| hours?
| jonatron wrote:
| How much is 1.5PB of tapes, and 1.5PB of hard drives?
| jpc0 wrote:
| I would hazard a guess that storing tapes takes up
| significantly less physical space than hard drives.
|
| I don't think hard drive based storage and tape bases
| storage have quite the same use case.
| dagw wrote:
| _I would hazard a guess that storing tapes takes up
| significantly less physical space than hard drives._
|
| An 18TB tape is basically the same size as an 18TB 3.5"
| hard drive.
| adrian_b wrote:
| I doubt that this can be true.
|
| I am using older LTO-7 cartridges, with a raw capacity of
| 6 TB. The newer LTO cartridges must be compatible
| mechanically with the old cartridges, because the same
| drive must be able to read and write them.
|
| The LTO cartridges are smaller than 3.5" drives, they
| have maybe about 2/3 of the volume of a 3.5" HDD.
|
| Moreover, a tape cartridge is many times lighter than a
| HDD. I have suitcases with 20 tape cartridges that are as
| convenient to carry as any typical suitcase.
|
| A luggage carrying 20 HDDs would have a very noticeable
| weight, and its volume would be great not only due to the
| bigger HDDs, but it would require serious padding to
| avoid HDD destruction if the case were dropped
| accidentally.
| dagw wrote:
| OK, you made me do the math. LTO tapes are 225 cm^3 and
| 3.5" HDDs are 245 cm^3 so I stand corrected. The weight
| point is a really good one as well as a HDD is 3 times
| the weight of a tape.
| throw0101a wrote:
| 18TB(raw) LTO-9 tapes go for US$ 105:
|
| * https://tapeandmedia.com/lto-ultrium-9-tapes/
|
| If your data is compressible then you can of course store
| more. The drives themselves use Streaming Lossless Data
| Compression, but of course you can send them things like
| gzip, JPEG, MPEG files which are already compressed; SLDC:
|
| * https://www.ecma-international.org/wp-
| content/uploads/ECMA-3...
|
| LTO-10 is supposed to have 36TB raw and is estimated for
| perhaps 2024.
| dagw wrote:
| Tapes are roughly 3 times cheaper pr. TB than hard drives.
| wongarsu wrote:
| About $8000 of LTO-9 tape, $21000 of Toshiba MG10 hard
| drives, $38000 of Seagate IronWolf Pro NAS hard drives.
| RuggedPineapple wrote:
| Not only exist, but sell at higher quantities then they ever
| had. When you need near absolute faith in archived data there's
| not much else that competes. Longer expected life then drives
| by close to an order of magnitude.
| MDGeist wrote:
| I used to do consulting work for storage vendors and anytime
| someone would imply a technology was legacy or on the way out
| they'd bring up how tape and mainframe still made money so
| nothing old ever dies... To be fair, I suspect some very cold
| tier cloud storage services have tape behind them.
| deepspace wrote:
| I used to work in the bulk storage industry and the running
| joke from 2005 until 2018 when I left was "surely this is the
| year tape will become obsolete".
|
| Cold tier cloud storage absolutely has tape behind it. You
| can even send tapes to some cloud vendors.
|
| Broadcasting is another giant customer. Companies like WBD
| have Exabytes or Zettabytes of digitized programming (movies,
| series, documentaries) which would be impractical to store on
| disk. The typical workflow is for the program scheduler to
| direct the robot to fetch the tape containing a program 24
| hours in advance of the broadcast time and copy it to disk,
| then erasing the disk copy after broadcast.
| laurensr wrote:
| I'm still looking for an affordable external tape drive. There's
| RDX but their tapes seem a lot more expensive per TB.
|
| e.g. LTO 3TB costs 30 EUR RDX 2TB costs 265 EUR
| Hamuko wrote:
| I've considered getting an external Blu-ray writer and just a
| bunch of quality inorganic blank discs as a tape alternative
| archiving solution.
| a20eac1d wrote:
| That's exactly what I've been looking into lately.
|
| Did you have any specific discs in mind?
|
| I recently bought "Sony Blu-ray BD-R XL 128GB", but I
| couldn't find any info whether its organic or inorganic.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| Any external BluRay reader/writer you'd recommend? (which
| supports disks from 25 GB up to the 128 GB you mention)?
| Hamuko wrote:
| The way I've understood it is that BDs are inorganic as
| long as you don't buy LTH discs.
| layer8 wrote:
| You might want to consider M-Discs.
| Hamuko wrote:
| AFAIK, M-Discs don't really make a that much of a
| difference if you're not dealing with DVDs.
| a20eac1d wrote:
| Do you mean in comparison to regular BDXL Blurays?
| Hamuko wrote:
| Basically all non-LTH BDs. The way I've understood it,
| the big selling point in M-Disc DVDs vs. regular DVDs was
| the inorganic dye used in it. But if you buy a non-LTH
| BD, you'll have an inorganic dye anyways.
|
| The company that actually made M-Discs also went bust and
| there's a lot of conflicting information on the Internet
| whether or not the current M-Discs are real M-Discs or
| not.
| throw0101a wrote:
| Define "affordable". Lots of LTO-6 drives available for less
| than US$ 1000:
|
| * https://www.ebay.com/b/LTO-6-Tape-Data-Cartridge-
| Drives/3997...
|
| Here's an eight-slot SAS library:
|
| * https://www.ebay.com/itm/385724855188
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| If you intend for your tapes to fit in the library, 20TB for
| $1000+$200 does not qualify as affordable.
|
| It's reasonably possible to hit a target of 2x hard drive
| cost with loose tapes but you need a lot of data.
|
| And trying to match the price of hard drives with $10/TB
| tapes will require piles of data and piles of tapes.
| svennek wrote:
| RDX is diskbased, not tape based (that is the D in the name)..
|
| https://buy.hpe.com/us/en/storage/disk-storage-systems/remov...
| [deleted]
| tomjen3 wrote:
| Same issue for me. I need to archive a bunch of data once or
| twice, put the tape on a shelf in my parents home and then I
| don't plan to do anything with it unless my NAS self destructs.
|
| Ideally I would be able to rent a tape drive, even if it costs
| 100 dollars per day it wouldn't really matter.
| narrator wrote:
| It's weird how tape size just seems to increase steadilyin a
| smooth curve to roughly match whatever hard drives are doing. It
| makes me wonder sometimes if they had this tech all along, but it
| was better just to slow roll it out so they could sell multiple
| generations of hardware. I guess only the material scientists at
| these companies know what's really going on.
| rout39574 wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| IBM's had several generations of tape tech in the can, and has
| managed the rollouts with calm competence for at least back to
| '97 when I got started in the backup business.
|
| Their research is a prominent part of the LTO platform, too. My
| observation of that landscape was that they gave toys to LTO at
| a rate calculated to extinguish the utility of tape research in
| other places. This means there's a plausible competition, which
| IBM wins all the time.
|
| This may sound like I'm down on them for it; I'm not. Their
| hardware was rock solid, performed as advertised.
| y04nn wrote:
| In one way, this is better to have multiple generations because
| you have to fill the tapes and with new generations we have
| better transfer speeds. Also with the backward compatibility,
| old tapes are transferred to new tapes, so the shelf longevity
| of the tapes are never really tested.
| skywal_l wrote:
| Look at Wikipedia [0], they have it planned for the next ten
| years like clockwork.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open#Generations
| peppermint_gum wrote:
| Well, yes, the article mentions the potential of the strontium
| ferrite, with existing prototypes having hundreds of terabytes
| of capacity.
|
| Similarly, HAMR and MAMR will be milked for years in the world
| of magnetic hard drives.
| vGPU wrote:
| > Fujifilm has demonstrated a 580TB raw capacity tape using
| Strontium Ferrite particles so there is a lot of runway for
| future capacity increases.
|
| I would guess so.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| Kinda wish they would pack this technology into a consumer
| version in Compact Cassette format.
| myself248 wrote:
| I wonder what the world would look like if the Pereos tape
| drive had caught on and then been steadily improved. It was
| doing 1GB/tape (500MB/side) in 1994, on a tape that perches
| cozily on a fingertip, and theoretically should've been easy
| enough to build into all sorts of consumer electronics.
|
| Sony made digital cameras that recorded to floppy disk (the
| Digital Magnetic Video Camera, or MaViCa), and Agfa made one
| that recorded to PocketZip, the 40MB shrink of Zip disks. Both
| random-access media, but that isn't crucial for a digital
| camera. Could easily record to linear media, and in fact a
| later Digital Mavica did just that, onto CD-R discs. So
| recording to tape wouldn't be a stretch at all.
|
| Instead of deleting photos on the camera, you could perhaps
| mark them for deletion but then have that take effect at
| offload time. Then blank the tape and use it again. At a time
| when 64MB flash cards were barely affordable, a 500MB tape
| would've been a gamechanger.
|
| I use cameras as an example because they're probably the use-
| case that benefits most from a capacious writable medium in a
| portable format.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| Wow. Prosumer storage technology has rocketed past even
| enterprise backup technology.
| juancn wrote:
| > The TS1170 drive operates at 400MBps raw throughput
|
| Am I reading this right? At that throughput it would take about a
| year to fill a compressed tape (assuming 3:1 ratio is
| achievable).
|
| Or is there some parallelism involved? (i.e. many tracks written
| in parallel to the tape, I don't know a lot about tape drives)
| rowanG077 wrote:
| I don't think that is correct. 50tb / 400mb/s = 1.45 days
| ant6n wrote:
| Your math is wrong.
|
| (50 terabytes) / (400 megabytes) = 125000
| [deleted]
| 1xb3l wrote:
| [dead]
| [deleted]
| timbit42 wrote:
| 125,000 seconds = 34.72 hours
| g105b wrote:
| So the entire Spotify library can be stored on a single tape!
| What interesting times we live in.
| pdntspa wrote:
| How rich will I need to be to get one of these for my home
| storage array? It is hard to find a cloud backup provider that
| will take 10+TB without freaking out on price.
| redundantly wrote:
| Without knowing how much storage space you have nor what kind
| of array you own I can tell you with 99.99% certainty it would
| be by far much cheaper to just buy the same storage hardware
| and just copy your data to it.
| pdntspa wrote:
| I get that but I would really like tape backup if it was
| viable, it's simpler and more compact.
| redundantly wrote:
| Tape backup isn't simple. Steer clear of it.
|
| It would be faster, easier, and cheaper to backup to a
| second set of disks and store them at a relative's or
| friend's place.
|
| Some people keep a copy of their data at their place of
| work. Personally I'm opposed to that.
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