IBM prepares to demo 125TB MONSTER tape

Re: Apples and oranges

Tapes have hardware compression, disks don't, this is why tape drives quote compression and disks don't. Everyone knows that you take a rough rule of thumb of half the compression quoted for normal data and if you have specialist non-compressible data you should know to use the native capacity, which is always stated alongside the theoretical compression ratio.

Tape does not operate in an hermetically sealed unit protected from everything, though, that's the point. That's why.

A speck of dust would *destroy* a hard disk platter to make it unreadable (and you can't crack it open to blow it off and carry on even if that worked!). A speck of dust on a tape will be cleaned off by various brushes and be lost in the data's error correction anyway.

Tape has its own problems though - stretching, temperature expansion, and all sorts of other nasties that *don't* affect disks.

Which is why tape should never be your ONLY backup. Hell, stick it in the corporate backup scheme to backup to external USB hard drive WHILE spooling to tape. Because that hard drive won't give you 100% complete backup reliability, but it can be taken off-site too, replaced easily and cheaply, encrypted just the same, but will survive different *types* of disasters and restore more quickly. Hell, I've seen hard drives that have been submerged brought back to life. I don't think tape would quite stand the same treatment. And with backup the biggest word is REDUNDANCY - redundant backups on redundant media with redundant hardware (no point spending £10,000 on a tape backup system if you only have one tape drive and the place floods even if the off-site tapes are intact) with redundant methodologies in redundant locations.

Re: Tape not dead yet?

See Lee's post...

Re: Tape not dead yet?

It's because tape hasn't stayed still, while everything developed round it. If hard disk capacities were growing and the primary long term backup technology didn't, there would be a serious problem.

Re: Tape not dead yet?

AC's law of technology death:

1) Tape cease to be a viable backup medium approx. 6 months after we run out of IP addresses.

2) The Internet will run out of IP addresses 6 months after tape ceases to be a viable backup medium.

Don't joke, wait for usb drive guys

I see you are a bit sarcastic but seriously a lot of good quality enterprise articles are on the register being wasted by comments which are seriously ignorant.

Problem is, they are all or will soon be in IT sector.

I have even seen an idiot comparing a Z10 enterprise to his desktop gaming machine.

It is like (no, not truck) comparing a 4K A list Hollywood production to your handheld "full HD" camera.

For beginners, these tapes will be stored in underground silos with 5 level biometric security and even armed guards. Such data will never be joked with. We are speaking about trillions of dollars and even human life in some cases. IBM, mainframes are responsible for 80% of data in world, hiding that fact is a PR genius.

Re: It would be nice to see prosumer level tape..

There is a market for real, reliable hassle free daily backups but it seems the false sense of usb hard disk security killed it. So nobody dares to R&D a small company thing.

Also, you know they even offload the entire company to google, dropbox etc. I was shocked when I saw a multi million surprise advertising campaign final cut was stored in a dropbox account, shared between 5 users and secured (!) via "PaSWord".

No kidding. Just 5 years ago, these idiots were using an actual bank safe for single copy cassette.

Re: "Three days to fill at LTO-5 speeds. This does not matter"

When this is released in 10 to 20 years the drives that would use these would certainly not be reading / writing at LTO5 speeds.