IBM and Fujifilm develop 35TB magnetic tape cartridges, unveil it in black and white
By Darren Murph 
posted January 23rd 2010 2:26AM
posted January 23rd 2010 2:26AM
SSDs may be what's "next," but seriously -- magnetic tape storage is the real heat. This darn near antediluvian storage medium is amazingly still around and kicking, and what's even more incredible is that real advancements are taking place. Just under four years ago, IBM and Fujifilm were doing the 
@joebob There is no debate about evolution vs creationism here. In fact, it wasn't mentioned until your post. I simply made an observation.
The point I was making was about how different things can be gleaned from an article - some relevant, and some (like mine) irrelevant.
@tadghostal
The word is used as meaning 'ridiculously oldfashioned too in normal use.
I don't expect engadget has writers who are that daft that they are creationists, even though 80% of the US population is according to studies done, and even though darren is from north carolina (no offense)
@tadghostal
There wasn't any debate about evolution vs. creation, my comment was about the fact that him being a creationist or evolutionist has nothing to do with magnetic tape.
Same goes for you, Wwhat, possible and/or perceived religious beliefs of the authors have nothing to do with a technology blog. As along as one doesn't actively proselytize about their beliefs (whether it be creation or evolution) on said tech blog, the credibility of the blog should not be in question because of it.
This may seem like a religion vs. evolution argument, but its not. All I'm saying is that this argument, and subtle jabs toward one group or another, do not belong here, (there is a proper time and place for everything).
Am I making sense?
@joebob
Basically I'm saying save the proselytizing for the apple-fan-boys.
If a person lacks sanity that will reflect in his writing I expect..
Why are all you people so shocked that tape is still around? Not every piece of technology is intended to be used in the home.
Even datacenters that use online disk backup still make their offline backups on tape to be stored offsite in a place like Iron Mountain. Some places use offsite disk mirroring, but there's a limit in terms of the amount of data that you can use that for.
Modern tape drives don't look like the old open reel mainframe drives. Most commonly they come either in a small standalone drive that's about 3x the size of a dvd drive or in a library with robotics to load and unload the tapes automatically. Watching a modern one of those in action is definitely not an "effective step back" or a "techno relic".
Old School FTW!
Tape is still used alot in a data center / server environment for backups.
Of course they're still in use, they're the only reliable way to back up data indefinitely in major servers. Hard Drives eventually die, that magentic tape lasts as long as you store it properly.
I wonder how long a HD last if you just write it full then park the heads and power them down.
I read that the heads must be lifted else they fuse with the platter over time, and the axis can also dry down and stop being able to turn, depending on used system, but that doesn't affect the data itself I guess, you could (for a lot of money) fix that and have the data intact.
@Wwhat I always wondered this, why couldn't the HD platters be interchangeable, like a CD, a very volatile CD, but a removable one...
@Eugene Action
Yeah, they were called SyQuest drives. Iomega also had the Jaz drive.
90s FTW!
@johnnj
good point johmmj, and clever that you recall/know that, because I could draw zip drives from memory but those interchangeable platters I forgot hearing about already.
As I recall they found that zip drives didn't keep data that long though, like 10 years or something? But hey burned CD/DVD's don't last much longer I'm told, and in some cases significantly shorter.
It's all a bit sad how we can't make anything that lasts really, and don't tell me tapes do, it's all claims and I bet it's not true, plastic degrades too and magnetic patterns also degrade, might take 50 years but it'll go bad if you don't rewrite it to new tapes.
Here's my idea for a fix: a CNC that hammers bits into stone, that should last.
Big brother will fear no more where to store all the mountains of data it collects on everyone now
I hear that.
Most unsuccessful spammer ever?
reel interesting stuff
wonder if the'll utilize 8-track tech to make file searching easer
@possum5
Over 28,000 tracks. 1/2" wide tape with sub-0.45 micrometer width tracks.
Hackers gave me tape worms. :(
lolz
I wonder when Hollywood will catch on... all listed specs fit perfectly for digital cinema distribution.
How much do tapes cost anyway?
@martix
They are pretty pricey, they used to (might still do) sell home-versions to backup HD's but the tapes were bloody expensive, and professional tape would only cost more I imagine.
LTO Ultrium 4 800GB tapes (1.6TB compressed) are $12.99 from Insight. That's the straight web price, not including any quantity discounts or the normal corporate discounts offered to regular customers.
Drives are a different matter. A Quantum LTO-4 HH (internal half-height drive, the same size as a normal desktop optical drive, with a SAS/SATA interface) runs around $1600.
Since these are business-oriented, they come with a 3-year warranty that promises a 2-day response time.
OS support: UNIX, Apple MacOS, Novell NetWare, Linux, Microsoft Windows.
And to confirm vlad the inhaler's specs, these do have a transfer rate of 120MBps (240MBps compressed) and an average seek time of 55sec.
For those with, um, controversial content, these offer hardware AES 256-bit encryption.
Are you going to be able to buy 5TB of drives to back up your RAID array (6 1TB drives in RAID5) for $82? I don't think so.
Much less drives to have separate daily, weekly, monthly, and annual backup sets. Most companies do that. And all but the latest versions are kept in an off-site vault, so factor in the larger vault you'll need to rent for disk drives.
So, backing up that 5TB of space, using a normal rotation, with tapes would cost $2092, including your first annual tape. If you're starting from scratch, add in the cost of the tape drive to bring that to $3692.
Doing the same backup with hard drives, assuming 1TB drives at $100 each, would cost $11,500.
And remember that the hard drives have a typical life of three years. So factor in drive replacement every three years. And re-copying and replacing your long-term backup drives, since they will also fail due to degradation. The tapes don't need to be replaced, but even if you replace your rotation tapes anyway, you're still saving some $9000 a year.
On my last salary job, we used a disk-to-disk backup hourly, since you can't practically do that with tape. (We were planning a cluster, but had not implemented it yet.) We then did the nightly tape backups from the backup disk array to reduce the performance hit on the production servers.
So I see how it would be cheaper for them. Honestly film reel to HDD seems like a bigger jump than reel to mag tape.
@Michael Pollard
Wow that's not too bad on those tape prices, hell of a lot better than blu-ray-R disk eh.
I guess magnetic tape has gotten a lot cheaper over time.
(although, they still sell 3.5" floppies too and those are priced like $10 a pack in many retail stores, for 1.44MB a disk, same material basically; for those prices, makes you roll your eyes)
It's great how such an old technology can still be useful today, but will it blend?
ahh i want this in my computer i will get rid of some useless things like my graphics cards and my life to have it
Compared to a regular hardrive, data on a magnetic tape might
last longer, but i was wondering how would you compare it with
an SSD. And what if the old floppy disk were to employ this
technology, what will be their capacity today at 29.5 billion bits/sq.in.
just wondering.
The tape is a lie...
"your great grandchild's medical records"
Not just that, but anything and everything about YOU.
how about speed
http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2006/05/17/univac-magnetic-tape/