IBM and Fuji Announce Tape Storage Breakthrough

robkill writes "IBM and Fuji have announced a breakthrough in the amount of data that can be stored on magnetic tape, a 15X improvement to 6.67 billion bits of data per square inch. IBM estimates that it will be 5 years before this hits the mass market"

Okay. Fine. But....

[blair1q]

How long does it take to write this stuff?

And how long to seek?

Because if it isn't faster than swapping old-technology tapes, it's not worth a damn.

Re:Death?

[Ryan Amos]

When a 500 GB hard drive costs $75, can be thrown across the room and have a chance of working, weighs the same as a tape and can be easily inserted/removed in bulk with software management and barcode readers to keep track of it all for you.

Until then, tape will stick around. I have a feeling it might be a while.

Re:Death?

[TeknoHog]

I'm honestly surprised that the state of optical media has progressed so slowly though. BlueRay and HD may seem very large, but considering the size of our hard drives, I'd be happier if 5 inch CD formfactor media could store on the order of ~100GB.

There's also some advantage in separating the storage medium from the read/write heads. If either part in a hard drive fails, you're literally fscked (except for some really expensive recovery solutions by Ibas [ibas.com] or the like). On the other hand, you can always put an optical disc in a brand new drive. And if a disc is scratched beyond readability in your current drive, chances are you can read it with another drive in the future.

How many years?

[Nom du Keyboard]

Isn't five years the typical projected time span for something you're not going to see nearly as soon as you think? I remember in five years we're going to have flat-screen televisions you can hang on your wall. And while we do have exactly that now, I first heard this prediction twenty-five years ago!

And I'm still waiting for the flat-screen TV you unroll like a poster and tack up with some double-sided tape.

So this IBM announcement fails to excite. Five years is a very long time in the technology industry.

Over-priced?

[winkydink]

Is the value of your data that cheap? If so, hdd's may be just the thing for you. The three variables in play are for data backup & restore are: Fast, Reliable & Cheap. Pick any two.

half the battle

[NMerriam]

In my experience, the trouble is not in writing lots of data to tape, it's in reading it successfully afterwards. /only half-joking

Re:Death?

[dgatwood]

The problem with tape is that the capacity sucks relative to what you're backing up. The biggest tapes (as best I could find in a quick web search) hold 400GB each. The hard drive in my desktop is 500GB. My desktop's drives total 750GB. It would take two full tapes to do a single full backup.

The industry predicts that with the newer drive head technologies coming out, HD capacity will double every 12 months. This means that:

1 year: 1 TB
2 years: 2TB
3 years: 4 TB
4 years: 8 TB
5 years: 16 TB

So with this new technology, the tape capacity will still have slipped from 80% of the capacity of the largest single drive to 50% of the capacity of the largest single drive. And this ignores things like perpendicular storage, which have the potential to add an order of magnitude to all of those numbers.

When they said "15x the current capacity," my first thought was "When can I get one?" When they said "5 years," my second thought was "By then, 15x the current capacity will be too small." 400 GB takes 83 square feet. At tape densities, my laptop hard drive would take up half my office.... When are backup storage vendors going to actually get ahead of the density curve instead of lagging decades behind?