Sony Tape Storage Breakthrough Could Bring Us 185 TB Cartridges

jfruh (300774) writes "Who says tape storage is out of date? Sony researchers have announced a breakthrough in magnetic tape tech that increases the data density per square inch by a factor of 74. The result could be 185 TB tape cartridges. 'By comparison, LTO-6 (Linear Tape-Open), the latest generation of magnetic tape storage, has a density of 2 gigabits per square inch, or 2.5 TB per cartridge uncompressed.'"

Re:By way of context...

[kernel_user]

> We record HD pretty much around the clock, So basically you never watch anything. Also, if that happens to be true, all you have is 16TB of *footage*, not 16TB of actual watchable family video. I think it's a kind of hoarding.. You're a hoarder.

Re:By way of context...

[MightyYar]

There's always a tradeoff between hoarding and becoming a librarian. I could dedicate the next month of my free time to reducing my storage footprint, or I could cough up another $200 to increase my server space a bit. With the exception of running something like Grand Perspective, Space Monger, Baobab, etc. I'd rather just spend a few bucks.

Re:By way of context...

[GrumpySteen]

Don't forget the 75GB of text documents. Even if they're uncompressed, that's around 30 million pages of text.

It's the most impressive collection of slash fiction about Kirk and Spock getting it on in the known universe.

Re:By way of context...

[jythie]

Which is why tape will probably be around for a long time. It is great that HDDs have become more economical for things they are good at, but there will probably never be one solution across the entire range of use cases. Tape has its place.

Re:By way of context...

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Given how large the known universe is, are you surprised? It would take a lot of pages to describe their sex in all those different galaxies.

Re: But is it even usable?

[CastrTroy]

Which is why hard drives are a much better solution than tapes. With tapes, most people write them, put them on a shelf, and hope that the next time they need them they actually work. Every time you read them, you degrade them, so actually checking if they work once in a while could be detrimental. Contrast that with hard disks. Use RAID on the main machine to increase uptime. Then backup everything to a completely seperate RAID array. Disks are a lot better at holding up to continuous use, so you can check frequently for errors in the data, and fix it before it becomes a problem. I don't think cost per gigabyte should actually be a big part of the equation. Everybody always mentions the price of the tape drive, but when talking about hard drives, they fail to account for the cost of a box that can handle 20-40 drives and act as a real backup solution.

Re:Don't worry, NSA will still buy American

[Captain Splendid]

Why would you say that? All they need to do is patent the technology then collect royalties and/or licensing agreements.

The joke is that every time Sony's tried that gambit in the past, they failed miserably. Betamax and Minidisc are two great examples of this.