test content
Logo
What is the Arc Client?
Install Arc
soo... the data tapes in TOS might not have been so outdated....
skollulfr
Member Posts: 5,407 Arc User
Sony might just make long-term storage of massive amounts of media a non-issue. A cassette tape recently developed by the company has a storage capacity of a whopping 185 terabytes, and depending on the logistics of the new device, it could have massive implications for the filmmaking world.
yup, thats right, 185terabyte cassette tapes.
yup, thats right, 185terabyte cassette tapes.
startrek online - to seek out new life, and seduce or kill it.
heh heh
heh heh
Post edited by skollulfr on
0
Comments
My character Tsin'xing
Just don't leave one on your stereo speakers.......
I am curious about optical crystal storage, I heard that prototypes were in development already.
My character Tsin'xing
Looks like for now the technology is solely in the hands of government/research (which I have no problem with). Hopefully it will make it to the public sector sooner than later. They remind me of the Sunstone Crystals as seen in Superman's Fortress of Solitude. Or when in wafer form, Isolinear Chips.
My character Tsin'xing
Ha! That probably isn't out of the question in the not so distant future. Science is awesome!
Nice! Good MST3K reference!
I know they keep the Johnny Carson master tapes in an undisclosed salt mine in the middle of nowhere.
But how quickly will these casettes or the magnetic tape degrade, and what areas will they survive the most in?
Another big question -- the equipment needed to read the tapes. If we're talking long-term storage, where they can simply be desposited and forgotten about for a number of decades or centuries, there needs to be an easy-to-use, easy-to-repair device in order to pull the data off of it.
If there's important information on these tapes, then the technology needed to read it needs to be future-proof. Who knows what technology we'll be using 50 or 500 years from now? If confronted with these magnetic tapes, will we have simply forgotten how to access them?
What if English is no longer spoken? There needs to be diagrams and other symbols that could be easily understood by a reasonable person in order for the data retrieval devices to be used.
You don't want to run into a scenario where someone is trying to play a Vinyl record on a CD player. Similarly, you don't want the magnetic casettes to be easily destroyed by misuse.
Careful. I wouldn't say you that are proving him wrong (Profs don't like to hear that kind of thing). As iconians points out it is very much an antiquated medium. Optical/crystal/solid state technology is the future. I'm sure someone in the world still uses cassettes to record their favorite songs on the radio too, that doesn't mean that the cassette is mainstream or has a future.
My character Tsin'xing
That's what great about GGG. It has a mineral hardness of 6.5. Other substances or minerals that are in that range include: fused quartz, iron pyrite, silicon, ruthenium, iridium, tantalum, opal, peridot, tanzanite. So if you hit it with a hammer, yes you will likely damage the crystal. Dropping one wouldn't be an issue, especially if it were encased in an enclosure (it also depends on the dimensions of the cut).
GGG also has a melting point of 1730 °C (silicon 1414 °C) so getting hot wouldn't be an issue structurally but I'm not sure what effect the extreme temps would have on data.
Honestly it's a tradeoff between storage density and price versus read/write time. Just looking at consumer-grade hardware, a solid-state hard disk speeds up your computer noticeably, but it costs a thousand-some-odd dollars per terabyte. Whereas while multi-terabyte magnetic drives are slower, they're maybe a hundred apiece last time I looked.
The biggest trouble with tapes like that, besides the thing iconians was talking about, is that getting the data onto and off of the storage medium takes a while.
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
also... I'm pretty sure fingerprints would be an issue too, so yeah they'd definitely need enclosures.
Anyways 6.5 isn't that high, crystalline Quartz is a 7, and Quartz sand is very common.
My character Tsin'xing
I agree. Places where speed isn't an issue and LTS is needed (like data centers) still use tapes actually. End users are still likely better served going with hard drives, spindle or solid state. Those tapes are 'cheaper' ($60 a pop right?) but the machine itself is in excess of $2K.
Yeah, it's very common (2nd more abundant mineral in Earth's crust) and with a hardness of 6.5 (mid-range, diamond 10) it isn't gonna shatter when it hits the floor as was previously stated.
As you know, quartz is a very abundant, resilient, and precise gem. It's why we use it in clocks.
My character Tsin'xing
Kids these days. :rolleyes:
The teacher is an idiot.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape_File_System
I work for a pretty big company... We receive hundreds of gigs per day of client data. While it is processed in our system the data inflates, almost triplicates.... We store all data received electronically and all work product on tape. As work is completed a script periodically scans, finds, copies the data to a server, zips it up into a ".tgz" file type, then writes it to tape, then updates a database regarding the work performed.
We have a robotic system with several tape drives and several cabinets full of hundreds of tapes. The robot arm can locate a tape and load it very quickly. We have several servers devoted to writing and reading data from tape. These servers talk to the tape system and hold the data as it is being written to retrieved. Think of it as a temporary "landing pad".
As far as some of the other posts...
* I don't know of any data centers at the poles.... lol
* Tapes last quite some time in environments that are regulated. Also... when you have such a tape storage system.... Part of the idea is that you transfer the data to new formats as they come out. That is just basic upkeep and responsibility... Especially for a company like us. If an idiot movie/television studio doesn't do that... then TRIBBLE them.
* Remember as density goes up....so does read/write speeds. LTO-6 speeds are about 160MB/sec which is on pair with a standard hard drive.
* The person who wrote the story who used the word cassette should be dragged out back and shot..... It's called a tape cartridge and looks nothing like a cassette. If you search SONY and 185TB you will see other stories where they don't use the word cassette, it was just the one idiot writer in the LA Times.
* No body in their right mind would store data on an SSD SAN just for it to sit there and be hosted. SSD SANs are for running VM's and databases from.
Also, we used to archive data to RAID 5 hard drive sets. When we needed to retrieve old data... we would manually plug all the drives in and load up the raid set in a drive array box. Very prone to failure and it was not shocking to lose an entire RAID set over a user error or some minor issue that marked the set bad. In contrast, the tape system is extremely reliable, scriptable, encrypted, contains parity data so we can restore corrupt archives, ect... It's miles ahead of storing to hard drives and stashing them away somewhere or running a HUGE SAN just to hold old work product.
Now, others are trying new stuff. Like Facebook writing to 10,000 Blurays. http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/01/why-facebook-thinks-blu-ray-discs-are-perfect-for-the-data-center/
However... that is a gigantic company on the bleeding edge, basically developing their own cold storage platform/ideas. Any company that needs a real solution right now... will go for a robotic tape system (LTO-5 or 6). And we don't mess around, we store a few petabytes ourselves on spindle SANs and process the data on SSD SANs for the pure speed.
Yeees!
I hope STO get's better ...