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back to article Square Kilometre Array reveals its 1.6TB-a-day storage and network rigs

Australia's first pass at the Square Kilometre Array – the Boolardy Engineering Test Array – is about to get commissioned into a fully-live system. The test array, known naturally enough as BETA, is part of the science-before-the-science: a proving ground for some of the new technologies being used for the SKA project, in …

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  1. Lusty

    Tape

    There we go then..tape isn't dead, official. For those who really really need it...

    2 0 Reply
    1. i like crisps
      Reply Icon
      Boffin

      Re: Tape

      When you say 'Tape' do you mean it's the size of a Cassette Tape (C-90) or a Betamax tape or VHS....larger, smaller, what?

      0 0 Reply
      1. Anonymous Coward
        Reply Icon
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Tape

        About 4x4x1", but these would be worked with in a pack that's a stack of 10 of them.

        0 0 Reply
  2. pierce

    aww, and after reading the headline, I was thinking, ok, 1.6TB/day, triple redundancy, thats like 8 4TB disks/week, no problem!

    tape? really? tape is for stuff you never want to have to read again. presumably all this science data will want to be read many times over.

    0 3 Reply
    1. John Robson Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Not quite...

      Tape is for stuff you want to read sequentially...

      And these files are sequential in nature.

      £50 for a 2TB HDD (consumer grade)

      £35 for a 2.5TB tape (LTO 6)

      4 0 Reply
      1. Callam McMillan
        Reply Icon

        Re: Not quite...

        Plus with tapes, you can load hundreds of them into a tape robot without issue.

        1 0 Reply
        1. localzuk Silver badge
          Reply Icon

          Re: Not quite...

          Not to mention, shipping tapes is a fair bit easier than hard disks. If you send a tape through the post, you can be pretty sure it'll arrive intact. If you send a hard drive, there's a fairly high chance that it'll get ruined by someone throwing the package across a warehouse.

          4 0 Reply
        2. Lusty
          Reply Icon

          Re: Not quite...

          Plus with tapes you don't have 1000 electricity sucking disks spinning all year, or the intern whose job is permanently seeking out duff drives, or the engineering team trying to scale a RAID solution instead of just adding another shelf of tape to the robot library.

          3 0 Reply
        3. Anonymous Coward
          Reply Icon
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Not quite...

          Loading hundreds of tapes into the robot is never an issue. The issue always comes when the robot inexplicably fails to insert the tape into the drive properly.

          3 0 Reply
          1. phil dude
            Reply Icon
            Linux

            Re: Not quite...

            I know my supercomputer data lives on tape!!! In fact when the tool retrieves it from HPSS you can tell how far it has been buried.... ;-)

            P.

            1 0 Reply
    2. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      > tape is for stuff you never want to have to read again.

      Or stuff you want to read in 50years time

      2 0 Reply
  3. Anthony Hegedus Silver badge
    Coat

    d'oh

    It took me the first few sentences to realise you weren't talking about a RAID array 1km square. I really must drink some more coffee....

    1 0 Reply
  4. tony2heads

    prior art from 2010

    http://www.lofar.org/observing-multiple-lofar-station-beams

    0 0 Reply
  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    currently working hard to fill the 10 PB ..

    News just in .. Intergalactic signal that filled the array, is in fact Jabba's secret porn stash of BBS (Big Beautiful Slugs).

    3 0 Reply
    1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
      Reply Icon
      Alien

      Re: currently working hard to fill the 10 PB ..

      Kim Dotcom is a fan and follower of Jabba on Galacto-Tweet and has already loaded it to MEGA!

      Get your slugs in!

      0 0 Reply
  6. David Casler

    Uh...check the math. 154 MB/sec is more like 6+ PB per 12 hours.

    0 0 Reply
  7. cray74

    Hard drive progress

    So...a 50PB hard drive (or solid state drive, whatever), is how many years away from being in your laptop? 10? 20?

    1 0 Reply
    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Hard drive progress

      about as many years as holographic drives, sigh.

      0 0 Reply

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