Cassettes are back in style

[Dripfree]

It looks like what was old is new again. I saw this on the news tonight and I thought it may be of interest to this community. Sony has developed 185 TB cassettes for backup purposes. Looks like there going to market it towards internet companies that have a lot of data to back up. The tapes can store data reliably on a medium that takes up less physical space then more modern options. If I went back in time and showed some Atari users a 185 TB tape would anyone even know what a TB was? I figure the term terabyte would come off sounding like a jiggawatt or a bazillion dollars! Just some made up term to describe an unimaginable storage capacity.

 

http://www.toptechnews.com/story.xhtml?story_id=023001IFGAYJ

Edited May 12, 2014 by Dripfree

[AtariGeezer]

Prefixes like kilo, mega, giga and tetra have been around for awhile. As in Radio Frequency and light wave.

Other prefixes are here: http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/definition/Kilo-mega-giga-tera-peta-and-all-that

 

Can't wait for a 128 yotta-bytes

[CatPix]

I think he meant that at the time, people could simply never figure out what kind of data would need so much storage space.

I remember myself buying a 250GO HDD back in 2003 and thinking "well, with that much space, I'll never need another one." I bough another 250GO HDD two years later

[carlsson]

While the capacity is exceptional, the use of backup tape stations have never really went out of fashion, has it? What strikes me with the article is it doesn't explicitely mention backup purposes, but also seems to suggest that 185 TB tapes would be alternatives to various hard drives and other types of memory in daily operation. In that case, I believe a system with many, smaller tapes would make more sense but perhaps I'm just misreading the article's intentions.

 

One gotta wonder though how much of those 5+ TB of data per person in 2020 will be junk or duplicates.

[CatPix]

Indeed, backup tapes never went out of fashion. Recently, some small businesses started to use HDD because it was cheaper to get a stack of spare HDD than a tape station, but for larger storage, tapes are still a solution, and were never even close to be phased out.

[+Gemintronic]

To make things even more confusing I'm pretty sure some "tapes" are actually HDDs in a cartridge nowadays. Probably to sell the HDDs at higher price

[kb9snl]

I noticed most of these articles on Sony's announcement immediately tied this medium (or implied as such) back to audio cassettes, which they most certainly aren't/will not be. They'll likely be in this form factor (LTO Family) or one similar. It has more in common functionally with VHS (spinning head, etc) than audio cassettes. I use these at work for server backups of over a TB of data nightly. they manage to increase it's storage capacity every few years, but NOTHING like Sony has announced. That's just crazy storage.

[Osgeld]

tape in serious enterprise never really left as its one of the best backup devices we have

[Keatah]

It looks like what was old is new again. I saw this on the news tonight and I thought it may be of interest to this community. Sony has developed 185 TB cassettes for backup purposes. Looks like there going to market it towards internet companies that have a lot of data to back up. The tapes can store data reliably on a medium that takes up less physical space then more modern options. If I went back in time and showed some Atari users a 185 TB tape would anyone even know what a TB was? I figure the term terabyte would come off sounding like a jiggawatt or a bazillion dollars! Just some made up term to describe an unimaginable storage capacity.

 

http://www.toptechnews.com/story.xhtml?story_id=023001IFGAYJ

 

 

Serial media is great and cosdt-effective for industry, and this capacity bump is welcome. However, it is only 1 of 4 planned classes. It is also the smallest.

 

Consumers like and prefer random access like JumpDrives and removable HDD.

 

When I was a little kid, the biggest computer I could realistically imagine (and wrote about in a sci-fi story) was a dual disk 400MB + 400MB rig. It had 64 6502 processors and a master Z80 to oversee it all. And it had a tape recorder constantly on and stream-recording the activity of the system. Constantly taking realtime snapshots of the memory. A kind of mechanical memory. And it had cassettes of 200TB in size more or less.

[Greg2600]

Tapes are never going to be replaced. Alternative, all disc or digital or flash solutions just aren't cheap or durable enough.

[Keatah]

Optical media is too delicate and prone to fading with time.

HDD is too shock-sensitive.

Flash is el-cheapo and has short life span + poor reliability.

[+Ksarul]

Actually, there are now optical disks which hold 100GB and which have a data-storage lifetime of about 1,000 years (no, that isn't a typo). They burn pits directly into an inner layer of the disk (which looks like lightly smoked glass and you can see right through the disk because there is no opaque substrate with these). These were designed for archival storage (and they're BD disks, so you can read/write them with any BD drive capable of reading a 100GB disk). As disks go, they're pretty close to indestructible. . .though 100GB is a lot less than 148TB (I got a chance to look at/play with the M-Disks at a computer trade show last week)

 

Here's a link to the M-Disk site:

 

http://www.mdisc.com/

[Keatah]

With the exponential increase of the rate of technological change, I wonder what device will be used to read these (or any of today's optical discs) in 50 years?

 

I also didn't see the 100GB discs for sale.

Edited May 13, 2014 by Keatah

[Rybags]

The CD form-factor is over 30 years in use now, with backward compatability.

Little reason to deviate from it unless some great advance is made, such as true 3D bitsetting or non-moving media.

 

But it's stalled in a sense - BluRay isn't very price-competitive with mechanical HDDs. In fact, even writable DVD has dropped behind.

[Andromeda Stardust]

LOL, I thought this thread was about audio cassettes making a comeback! And didn't many 80s computers use cassette decks with crappy low baud modems?

 

Last I checked BD-RW were nearly as expensive as movies. Is this price hike some lame attempt to thwart piracy, or are these discs really that expensive to produce?

[CatPix]

Indeed. Especially here in Europe. Floppies reader were expensive in the 8 bits era, and carts even more. (As quoted from.. can't recall where "why spending 40£ for a cart when the same game cost 25£ on floppy and 5£ on cassette?" )

Also floppies were more prone to damage (the 5"1/4), whereas cassettes were sturdy.

Also, over time, different methods were used so on some computer, you could speed up the loading process. But the faster tape reader is probably the Amstrad CPC 464. Most games load in an average of two minutes, meaning it was faster than the 1541 floppy reader for the C64!

 

And ultimately... In the 80's, double tape decks stereos were getting very common... You know what it means...

Edited May 13, 2014 by CatPix

[Osgeld]

in fairness the 1541 racing a tape drive is like a snail racing a slug

[Keatah]

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/05/the-library-of-congress-wants-to-destroy-your-old-cds-for-science/370804/

 

No worries, refresh and migrate are king. It's disappointing to hear the most mass-produced media is for distribution and consumption. I already have some DVD's rotting from a bacterial infection.

 

I've said it before, and I'll say it again.. HDD's are best for the consumer, with the only requirement being a periodic refresh for the paranoid. My informal long term testing "fleet" has about 12 drives now - ranging from a 10MB disk from the early 1980's through a modern day 2TB 2.5" disk. All have retained their data. And 3 of them are physically banged around more than normal, they're fine too. All have gone without refreshing too.

 

I would trust HDD and TAPE media more than optical. And it's ironic, because, "they" kept blabbering on how floppies wouldn't last. Well I got news for them sons-a-bitch assholes, I've got nearly 4700 (and counting) disks from 1979 - 1990 which are perfectly functional and retaining data. Without refreshing!

 

And now we're getting reports about how CD's are beginning to go bad, and DVD bronzing, well, that's a given!

 

"They" spout whatever bullshit seems to make sense at the time, anything to sell you an inferior product.

 

MAGNETIC MEDIA is king!

[CatPix]

I own one copy of two of the first CD ever released (tho yeah probably not "day one" ones) and they are in perfect working shape.

I have CR-ROM games dating from 1994, I have no issue reading them.

I have video DVD from 2001, etc...

The only burned CD I ever got trouble with were cheapo ones, and some of them were already hard to read outside of the burner. You buy shit - you get shit.

Like for tapes and floppies, CD have to be of good quality, and manipulated and stored right.

Sure there are issues with CD and DVD... as equally as there is issues with tapes and floppies. And don't tell me that YOUR tapes and floppies are fine.. It's notorious that magnetic reel to reel tapes made during the 70's by some brands are prone to fail due to manufacture processing.

As for HDD, I lost a 40 MO HDD from my Commodore SL 286 recently. One day I switched the computer on, and "cloc cloc cloc cloc".

In 2003 I bought one Maxtor DiamondMax HDD 160 Go, and a second one two years later. If you know your HDD history, you probably guess that both are now dead as shit.

 

I also have one Seagate ST-157A HDD. It's a 40 Mo HDD with lotsa plates :

It kinda still work... But the motor doesn't seems powerful enough. I guess the bearing are dead, because if I put it on the side or reverse and tap it a bit, it start to spin. With a characteristic sound of suffering bearing. Yeah, once it spin, it works fine, but starting it is begoming harder and harder. MaybeI can replace the bearings? maybe not. If that's the case, anything on it is lost.

HDD are goign to fail too eventually. Nothing is eternal; but when it come to computer, you can hardly expect a 100 years lifespan. (okay, a static, "working every years for some hours only" HDD might last more.)

Edited May 14, 2014 by CatPix

[Ed in SoDak]

The cassette storage on the TI99 was transferred at 110 baud. For comparison, 300 baud is about normal reading speed for scolling text. Barely tolerable for small program loading, but loading data into a program via cassette was excruciating since the routine included handshaking at the end of every line of inputted data. Back in the early 80's, you could drop some serious coin into taking your TI on up to include disk storage.

 

Reliable over time though if made as a direct SAVE CS1 command from the TI console. I'd guess most all my old tapes still read in as well as they did back in '84. My dad used a dual cassette recorder boombox to duplicate some of his tapes for me, and they were always very prone to having problems. I'd usually drill a small hole in the cassette player in order to access the alignment screw of the tape head for maximum output on tapes made by a different recorder.

 

Once I upgraded to floppies and copied my cassettes to disk, I pretty much never looked back. They do still load though, as do the floppies.

 

The only hard drive I ever lost was an 80meg SCSI external drive the dog knocked over with his wagging tail while the drive was being accessed. I'll never forget the sound of the head finding the platter and getting better acquainted with it. SSSCCCRRREEEEEEEWWWWwww!

 

-Ed

[Kapikui]

Most intelligent enterprise level backup systems have a combination of onsite and offsite storage, with as much as possible stored in fireproof and waterproof safes of some sort. The idea being that if one location is damaged, another is still there, and a minor fire needn't destroy all of your data.

 

Tapes have several advantages over Hard drives, most particularly, they are far more robust for handling. While a Hard Drive will often give you more storage for the money, I've dropped backup tapes from more than 7 feet without ill effect. Most hard drives would be done.

 

Hard drives are far better when the storage is not to be physically moved. However they don't like handling. I've also been given to understand that the bearings tend to dry out in one spot and seize if not used regularly.

 

Tapes can last much longer, and are more resistant to rough handling, which makes them far better for archiving data for things like offsite or long term archival backups.

 

The days of using tapes for active data are long gone, and never likely to return, but the need for massive space for archival storage with a minimum of moving parts that needs a minimum of maintenance will never leave.

[John_L]

I noticed most of these articles on Sony's announcement immediately tied this medium (or implied as such) back to audio cassettes, which they most certainly aren't/will not be. They'll likely be in this form factor (LTO Family) or one similar. It has more in common functionally with VHS (spinning head, etc) than audio cassettes. I use these at work for server backups of over a TB of data nightly. they manage to increase it's storage capacity every few years, but NOTHING like Sony has announced. That's just crazy storage.

1 TB nightly vs a 185 TB tape... looks like you'd only need to use 2 per year...

[Omega-TI]

Someone at the IRS would not like these...

[Ed in SoDak]

Or, maybe they would? "Gee, due to some unforeseen mishap, where my pet cat Lois playfully shredded a backup tape laying on my kitchen counter, and as a result a full 185 TB of precious data has been lost. Gosh this has never happened before ever!"