185 TB of data on a cassette

[Audio Al]

Who said cassettes were a thing of the past :D

http://gizmodo.com/sony-crams-3-700-blu-rays-worth-of-storage-in-a-single-1571508568

[nat8808]

The philips invented audio cassette is a thing of the past. Data backup cartridges though are still in production using magnetic tape, yes.. But they are completely different things!

One ignorant person somewhere has seen the technical press release and read "magnetic tape" and somehow thought it was an audio cassette :doh:

Then someone else ignorant runs with it and the story goes around, all the while referencing audio cassette so that even Forbes reports the non-story! http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2014/05/04/think-the-cassette-tape-is-dead-then-why-did-sony-just-cram-148tb-of-data-onto-one/ and further stoked by the Daily Mail http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2620478/Rebirth-CASSETTE-Sony-develops-tapes-3-700-times-storage-Blu-ray-disc.html

:doh: :doh: :doh: :brickwall: :brickwall:

At least the BBC get it right and report on it properly and factually, without ignorance: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-27282732

[nat8808]

Imagine how confused those people will be if you show them a CD-ROM cassette from the early 90s ..

[Techno Commander]

Ooh, 185TB of music. Just need one of these then.

http://www.highsnobiety.com/files/2012/09/cassette-iphone-mp3-converter-2-630x419.jpg

[Naughty Nigel]

This is hardly news! Magnetic tapes are widely used for business backup, and for very good reasons.

The tape drives are expensive (£1,000 plus for an LTO 4 drive), but the cartridges are cheap (about £16 each), and will store up to 1.6 TB of data! Better still, they will read and write faster than most hard disks, and when backing up from a RAID array will easily write at four or five gigabytes a minute. Tape is also much more reliable than CD's and DVD's which are prone to scratching and sunlight, and are painfully slow. Hard drives are convenient but slow and expensive.

The only newsworthy part of this story is that the data density achieved by Sony/IBM's engineers is much higher than anything that has gone before, but the technology is well tried and tested.

Oh, and whilst I remember, audio tapes were at one time used for data storage. DAT tapes used to be very popular for business data storage, but they were limited to about 40 gigabytes of data IIRC. These were eclipsed by the LTO (Linear Tape Open) standard, which was able to store much more data at lower cost using an 'open' design.

The current 'Ultrium' LTO6 tapes will store 6.25 TB on each cassette!

Nigel.

[nat8808]

Better to stick to "cartridge" to avoid confusion. Although then again, talking about magnetic tape and cartridges as one and the same thing will cause yet more audiophile confusion.

[nat8808]

Ooh, 185TB of music. Just need one of these then.

http://www.highsnobiety.com/files/2012/09/cassette-iphone-mp3-converter-2-630x419.jpg

Imagine trying to find a 4Mb track on a 185Tb linear tape cartridge. On random play the machine would probably set alight with burnt out motors..

[Naughty Nigel]

Imagine trying to find a 4Mb track on a 185Tb linear tape cartridge. On random play the machine would probably set alight with burnt out motors..

It's not that difficult actually. The backup software creates an index of the tape's contents so that individual files can be found quickly and easily. We use LTO3 and LTO4 tapes (800 GB and 1.6 TB respectively), and I would say that, on average, the seek time for individual files is less than one minute. Improved architecture in later iterations has reduced that time still further.

The key is that data is stored in hundreds or thousands of parallel tracks, so tape 'positioning' is much quicker than you would expect. Nevertheless, the LTO system is much better suited to backing up and restoring gigabytes or terabytes of data than individual files. Very large files can also span more than one tape cartridge.

(See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open .)

Nigel.