“Breakthrough” – IBM And Fujifilm Develop New Magnetic Tape With 580TB Capacity

Nation And State ^ | 12-26-2020 | Tyler Durden

[dp0622]

Odd story.

I left some 8 packs of batteries near a magnet in my drawer by accident.

They were all dead when I tried to use them some time later.

I was too lazy to look up why.

But it sucked :)

[Dr. Sivana]

Want to bet that the nsa has had thus for years?

I'll take that bet. I know someone who worked at a data center for the NSA. For storage, they were using off the shelf technology, just massive amounts of it. Tape has always had its uses in archiving, long term, and inexpensive bulk storage. That said, he claimed that the NSA was two years behind in processing the data and getting farther behind every day.

So what will this new format be called? LTO-140?

[Dr. Sivana]

[edwinland]

I really don’t understand IBM’s math. You would think that a tape with 317 GB (that’s about a third of a terabyte) per square inch, at 1255 meters (that’s 50,000 inches) long would store a lot more than 580 terabytes. If it were 1 inch wide that would be about 17,000 TB.

To be “only” 580 TB the tape would have to be .03 inches wide. Wouldn’t it snap?

[Hot Rod Garage]

As an early Data Processing professional ( IT Director ) The old tape drives and tape were very vulnerable to environment conditions and retrieving data and sorting was time consuming. However, it would seem that a cartridge would eliminate many of the original issues. However, if you need to get to the end of the tape, that will take some time. It is all relative though.

[PLMerite]

“Want to bet that the nsa has had thus for years?”

In the early days the Agency helped drive the development of data storage. Today maybe not so much.

[Bobalu]

pn2222A
pn2907A

[The Duke]

"Pfft - that’s easy - just make it a longer tape, DUH!"

You stole my idea. Canceling trip to the patent office. :(

[9YearLurker]

This is very bad news for freedom. 5G especially must be stopped and taken out to keep from accelerating the current monitoring and control abuses.

[The Duke]

"I ALWAYS came to grief when I tried to store data on magnetic tape"

TECH: Sorry, but your tape has stretched.

The only good thing about tape was the old HPUX 'ftio' utility. :) (I still love and use 'cpio')

[Crucial]

So we’re going back to floppy disks?

[dljordan]

“Tape rules in data center backup and archival. Always has. “

I started out on an IBM model 50 with the reel tapes. I can’t believe what they have now. I remember about 10 years ago some of the Fed departments that came to our facility to test STILL used reel to reel.

[Reeses]

Tape rules in data center backup and archival. Always has.

In practice, the odds of successfully retrieving something from super high density tape seem to run about 50%. They've pushed it too far.

[Vlad The Inhaler]

Anther way to control information and history

Once everything is moved to some form of digital or virtual storage and the hard copies are made unavailable all access to information will be controlled by those who manufacture and/or control the equipment to retrieve and convert the data.

The way ballot information is now controlled and manipulated by the Dominion voting machines and software.

What good is an 8-track music tape or a Beta video tape to someone without the equipment to read the data on the tapes?

What good are all the files people stored on old style 5” floppy discs without a device that can read the discs?

Even worse - what about information stored in the “Cloud”?

It’s not yours anymore - it’s “Theirs”.
For now they may let you access it but that access is not under your control.

At any moment, by intention or accident, you can be denied access to your own information.

[Dr. Sivana]

And how much is useful, ....................

.1%, but you don't know WHICH .1%

[ConservativeMind]

Great story!

[PeterPrinciple]

And how much is useful, ....................

.1%, but you don’t know WHICH .1%

---

well the .1% is not useful either because it is overwhelmed with the other.

Know WHICH is were wisdom comes into play.................

[Dr. Sivana]

Even inside of a piece of hardware there are limits as to how fast data can be moved. Those tapes would take a long time to write and a long time to read.

If the data are not fragmented, the retrieval speed can exceed physical hard drive speeds. That said, much day to day tape storage using regular storage software (TSM/Spectrum Protect, Netbackup, VEEAM) is stored at least temporarily in fragmented form, where even small amounts of specific data can span several tapes. That's what we have robot libraries for.

[libertylover]

I hated magnetic tape back in the day: was extremely unreliable

Me too. I hated that a tape would work fine on one machine but the machine next to it couldn't read it at all. Luckily, I didn't have to use them a lot.

[Dr. Sivana]

well the .1% is not useful either because it is overwhelmed with the other.

Computers do a very good job of keeping track of all of it. Part of my job is restoring from backups. A typical user may have 500,000 files backed up, and needs ONE restored. With just a few hints, I can find that one with the help of my storage software.