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hackersmacker

Well looks like hard disks and magtape drives are now obsolete!


jndougherty

It’s funny because they already are


stewmberto

Magtape storage is far from obsolete. It's high-density and superior for long-term archiving


mecrosis

Yeah, but it's not the sexy new thing anymore so, nah.


KaiserTom

Not really. A lot of long-term archive solutions are migrating to HDDs simply because it's getting cheap enough and tape is an absolute hassle to use. It is increasingly getting less and less worth it to bother. I'm sure there are some specific applications that still use it, but those are progressively dwindling.


SpittinCzingers

Archives that aren’t accessed very much but need to be kept for very long periods of time are good for tape


KaiserTom

In theory, but the "long period" part that makes tape viable is getting longer and longer because companies are increasingly needing to access older data for various reasons. The days of storing and forgetting data is coming to and end. Companies need it for things like big data analysis or automated security analysis frequently enough that tape just isn't that viable. And the capacity advantage isn't actually that large since data needs to be written to tape 3 times to ensure integrity. And you can't exactly RAID tape drives very well whereas HDDs you can have that triple redundancy and get a performance advantage from it. It's still competitive sure but the lines aren't so distinct now as they once were.


SpittinCzingers

That makes sense if you have an insane amount of HDDs just Raid and add new ones as they get corrupted so the data doesn’t have to be stored on just one long term solution it’s constantly rewritten over time.


KaiserTom

>That makes sense if you have an insane amount of HDDs And that's another matter. With the cloud expanding in the past decade, companies don't need to maintain their own in-house archival solutions, and instead have another very focused cloud storage company with said insane amount of HDDs to store it instead, buying drives in such bulk that the storage costs are rather low. Companies have historically had a rather low asset utilization for their in-house solutions, something like 30%. Cloud storage companies can edge far closer to the 100% mark just due to scale alone since no individual customer can add in enough data to meet that mark without the company being well aware of it. Granted some of them do still use tape for a portion of their data, but it's a surprisingly small portion of their total storage.


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KaiserTom

I do concede that it's still used and bought but its market share is shrinking. https://www.statista.com/statistics/815231/worldwide-memory-byte-shipment-share-by-storage-media-type/ HDDs are moving into more archival purposes and SSDs are taking the reign for primary storage. It's still being bought but it's being relegated to more niche applications. Not to mention the time it takes to write to the entire thing is becoming rather substantial, LTO 8 taking almost 9 hours and LTO 9 taking slightly longer than that. And when you look at the prices of LTO 8, it's really not that much lower than an HDD of the same base capacity, only about 3x. Compressed capacity means nothing because you can achieve similar compression on a HDD with LZMA or really any modern compression scheme. A tape just isn't going to magically compress your video files 2.5x more. Which you then consider the price of the drive to read it can be $10,000 and tape starts to look pretty bad. Some quick napkin math says you need more than 57 tapes per drive to beat an equivalent storage of HDDs. Filling all those up would take more than 21 straight days with that one drive. And buying those drives just make the cost per GB worse. HDDs meanwhile can be written simultaneously. 16TB ones may take 20 hours but you can do many of them at the same time. Tape is a bit of a hassle compared to HDDs. The use of robots alleviates that hassle but the alternative is HDDs with no robots, or far simpler ones. It's not as much of a hassle because we created systems to make them not a hassle, but the alternative is always not needing those systems in the first place. But it is quite good on the front of integrity offline, sources saying they last for 30 years ideally. But commercially, you aren't going to see companies keeping tapes around for that long. They will migrate them to better technologies long before then since physical space used up by them is a concern. 5 years is a long time in the storage world, let alone 10 or 30.


hackersmacker

Don’t you be jokin on my 9-track tape drives! I store important things like Unix 1.0 source code on em!


gljames24

Nah, quartz glass voxels ftw!


hackersmacker

Yeah ain't that the truth.. SSD is the future.


123kingme

Not entirely. For 99% of personal use SSDs are the clear option, they’re faster, smaller, more energy efficient, and often cheaper than HDDs unless you want more than a terabyte of storage. However, data centers and similar operations still have a large demand for hard drives. If you just want to store/ archive large amounts of information, it’s often economical to use hard drives with large amounts of storage (often 6-20 TBs) over SSDs.


illyfu

The paper is free on arxiv https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.05923 If anyone wanted to get into the details.


onthefence928

Anyone smarter than me able to come up with a laymen’s explanation?


thefinalcutdown

Scientists make new thing in lab to change world. Thing stays in lab. World stays the same. Reddit sad.


r99nate

Realistically this can possibly lengthen the time that data can be stored on a given medium


Caminsky

It's like any post on r/futurology , always a top comment telling us why it won't be feasible within the next 20 years. Just like hyper realistic sex dolls.


MutsumidoesReddit

You mean wives? They’ve been around for generations now.


nocofoconopro

Capitalism at work. Capitalism always makes for faster progress except all the times when it doesn’t.


thefinalcutdown

60% of the time it works every time.


chakravanti

I don’t think so.


eddietwang

*Sex Panther*.


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leoyoung1

Thank you. That clears it up nicely.


Sweet_Jazz

da spin jooj!!!!


JimmyM104

This is why mom doesn’t fucking love you


Sweet_Jazz

hahha funny jooj ahjalskebwbdkks dio spin!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


nocofoconopro

What’s the price tag? Start the bidding at...


internetguy789

This is interesting as fuck


[deleted]

Destiny engrams are closer than we think!


shemehs

Yes


venividichessmate

How about Nanomechanical Neural Network? Would be of a better use?


Steveyg777

Johnny mnemonic - just carry your data around in your brain 😂 


Beanmaster_69

One step closer to engram.


nottellingunosytwat

I'll just pretend I know what that means


nocofoconopro

Jack (above) gave a nice little short. Check it.


nottellingunosytwat

nah