[HN Gopher] Magnetic Tape Storage Technology: usage, history, an...
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Magnetic Tape Storage Technology: usage, history, and future
outlook
Author : matt_d
Score : 41 points
Date : 2025-06-29 06:47 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (dl.acm.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (dl.acm.org)
| johnklos wrote:
| Most of the people who parrot the "tape is dead" stuff haven't
| used tape.
|
| When it comes to the reliability of putting something on a shelf,
| then pulling it off twenty years later, tape still is better than
| everything else.
| amelius wrote:
| Yes, definitely true. And maybe they are even more relevant now
| because of all the data needed for deep learning.
|
| However, the drives are expensive. This industry is in dire
| need of disruption.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| Yep since IBM has the monopoly they have been squeezing
| everyone to the maximum degree. Too bad HP stopped their tape
| drive development. They kept IBM under control.
| bombcar wrote:
| $5k for a LTO9 drive isn't terribly bad; once you have any
| significant number of tapes.
|
| Expensive for home use, but they can buy older technology
| off-lease.
| buran77 wrote:
| > Expensive for home use, but they can buy older technology
|
| I can't imagine home users being interested in buying
| mostly used SCSI or SAS tape drives while navigating a
| world of format compatibility challenges and problems with
| improper storage. Environmental requirements for archival
| are narrow and most homes don't tick that box over many
| years or when moving.
|
| This medium is expensive, inconvenient to use and store,
| and in the world of home use those are killers. You don't
| need to take my word for it, look around at tape home use.
|
| Home users are better served by cloud storage or an
| external hard drive, maybe a home NAS, especially for the
| relatively low data volumes home usage usually involves.
| adrian_b wrote:
| The choice between magnetic tapes and disks depends
| mainly on the total amount of archived data.
|
| Some years ago, after I bought a LTO-7 drive at around
| $3000 as a home user, I have recovered its costs after
| about a couple hundred terabyte of stored data.
|
| Unfortunately, nowadays the drives for LTO-9 have
| increased in price, so the cutoff threshold has probably
| increased to several hundred terabytes.
|
| Even when the amount of stored data does not provide
| significant savings in the cost of storage media, it may
| still be worthwhile to use magnetic tapes, for improved
| peace of mind and for avoiding the hassle of copying the
| data to newer HDDs every few years.
|
| I am old enough to have seen enough data loss disasters,
| so I would never trust cloud storage, where the access to
| my own data would be dependent on my ability of making
| continuous payments to an external entity, which is
| really hard to predict for any distant future. Moreover,
| even with a fast Internet link the access speed to cloud
| storage is an order of magnitude slower than to a local
| tape drive or HDD.
| buran77 wrote:
| Look, I get it, you're a power user with very special
| needs. But the rest of the home user world is on a
| different page. It's funny if you think home users in
| general have these kinds of wants or needs just because
| you're a user, at home.
|
| The data volumes, the cost even before we look at the
| TCO, the performance characteristics, the time/expertise
| requirements, the need (hassle) for _proper_ storage and
| retrieval really kill the attraction of tape for home
| use.
|
| For the backup (and storage as a bonus) needs of most
| _home users_ cloud or external drives are unbeatable,
| especially in combination.
| bombcar wrote:
| I should have been more precise - by "home user" I meant
| people who run DataCenter equipment at home; datahoarders
| and homelabs.
| hulitu wrote:
| > For the backup (and storage as a bonus) needs of most
| home users cloud or external drives are unbeatable,
| especially in combination.
|
| Cloud is not a backup. Cloud is someone else's storage.
| dale_glass wrote:
| One thing that worries me about home tape use is dust and
| cat hair.
|
| I've had a DDS4 tape way back, which ended up dying, and
| that could well be the cause. My house is not going to be
| as clean as a server room.
|
| I've seen tape drives taken apart and there seems to be a
| worrying lack of concern with any kind of air filtration
| on the ones I've seen at least. And I don't think it
| should be all that hard to deal with it. Maybe something
| like sucking air in through a replaceable filter and
| exhausting it out of the tape door.
| 3eb7988a1663 wrote:
| Wouldn't a home air filter sitting adjacent to the tape
| drive remove almost all of that problem?
| amelius wrote:
| How about small startups?
| mystified5016 wrote:
| I was _extremely_ interested in tape when I started my
| homelab several years ago.
|
| The only options with more data capacity than a hard drive
| are all high end datacenter equipment. I would have had to
| buy fiber channel adapters and media, find a drive, a
| housing to put it in, and tapes. All separately, and each
| for several times what my entire homelab is worth.
|
| It really is not an option for home-gamers.
| wongarsu wrote:
| The break even point between tape and hard drives is
| somewhere around 400TB. A lot for a personal data collection,
| but not _that_ much in absolute terms.
| msgodel wrote:
| Blueray or even (possibly combined with) a 3rd party service
| probably makes way more sense for small businesses and
| individuals. That's what I currently use for archival.
| kvemkon wrote:
| > tape
|
| Only once (or very few times) overwritten?
|
| > on a shelf
|
| At home or in a specialized room with controlled climate?
|
| At least I cannot find quickly the requirement in someone (or a
| robot) pulling each tape once a year(?) and doing a rewind?
| Which is formally needed for HDD.
|
| Btw, shouldn't HDDs be much more resistant to magnetic fields
| than magnetic tapes?
|
| Edit:
|
| 26TB HDD Non-operating / storage:
|
| Temperature -40 to 70degC (Storage 0 to 70degC)
|
| Relative humidity 5 to 95% non-condensing
|
| Maximum wet bulb temperature: 35degC non-condensing
|
| Maximum temperature gradient: 30degC/Hour
|
| LTO 9+:
|
| Recommended Storage Environment: 15 to 25 / 20 to 50%RH / Max
| Wet Bulb Temperature: 26.
|
| Stray magnetic field at any point on tape not to exceed 50
| oersteds (4000 ampere/meter).
|
| [1] https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-
| library...
|
| [2] https://www.fujifilm.com/uk/en/business/data-
| management/data...
|
| [3] https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/storage-deep-
| archive?topic=media...
| marklar423 wrote:
| My company moved EiBs of data off of tape a few years ago. It was
| reliable and durable, but the problem was read speed.
|
| It took so long to move tapes around and read the sequentially
| (no random access!), and as the data corpus grew it got harder to
| have a practical backup, even though the data was still
| theoretically extant.
| dale_glass wrote:
| The bit on tape tension was really interesting!
|
| Turns out that modern drives can stretch the tape to make tracks
| line up right. It makes sense that as density grows, the real
| world effects of things like temperature and humidity require
| more and more work to compensate for.
| netbioserror wrote:
| Given the gains in tape and hard disk densities in recent years,
| why can't we revisit floppy disks as a potential long-term
| archival media for the future? Are they particularly volatile?
| Would the design of the physical disk case be able to solve for
| such issues?
| timewizard wrote:
| Everytime I see a Zip Drive in an old movie I get a serious
| pang of nostalgia. I wanted one of these so bad, yet, by the
| time I could afford it, they were no longer practical.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_drive
| mystified5016 wrote:
| Floppies are, in fact, volatile. They suffer from bit rot like
| CDs, and (AIUI) the magnetic flux is weaker and more prone to
| disappearing over time.
|
| Plus, all floppy drives are now multiple decades old.
|
| A new, modern removable magnetic disc format will certainly
| perform orders of magnitude better, but not anywhere close to
| to any other modern format in speed, density, or short-to-
| medium term stability.
|
| We _could_ make fantastic floppy drives today, but there is
| simply no economic reason to spend a billion dollars in R &D on
| it.
| qurashee wrote:
| I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Microsoft's research towards
| "replacing" tape storage in the future. Have a look at Project
| Silica.
|
| https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-sil...
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