Why Tape Storage is Making a Sneaky Comeback

[@Mooooov0815]

This is anything but a sneaky comeback. Tape storage has been the go to solution for large amounts of cheap archival storage for decades at this point. This tapes are produced by a variety of vendors and you’ll find tons of different archival systems powered by tape storage in essentially every datacenter

[@Haskellerz]

Tape costs a few hundred, meanwhile tape readers cost like $5,000. lol

[@Cinkodacs]

​@@Haskellerz Which for a company that needs it is basically nothing compared to the capabilities it may bring. Tape storage is usually not for the consumer market.

[@kaitlyn__L]

@@Haskellerz which is why companies used it and not regular people. When you’re spending millions on archive tapes a year the drive cost is nothing.

[@hogie13765]

Yup! I saw a ton of tape backups working with car dealers. You could usually find them piled up on the server rack 😂

[@someonestolemyname]

@@Cinkodacs Unless you are a compulsive hoarder along the ranks of r/DataHoarder

[@Krekkertje]

Tape has the added benefit that the data is separate from the reader. If read/write heads fail in a hard drive, you’re looking at a costly clean room operation to transfer the platters into a new enclosure in order to salvage the data. If your tape reader fails, you can just plug in a new tape reader, pop your tape in and you’re good to go.

[@ataphelicopter5734]

I’d guess that as tape speeds and data density increase the enclosure will become sealed and will eventually require a cleanroom to transfer, though I love the look of spinning tapes so a clear enclosure would be ideal

[@Krekkertje]

@@ataphelicopter5734 that would mean the read write head would be inside the tape cassette itself. I don’t see that happening anytime soon.

[@darrylpioch2055]

In recent times I've been interested in getting a tape drive for the studio computer to archive sessions on tape instead. At the moment I use blu ray discs in addition to the save drive. So if the drive fails eventually I can just drop in a blu ray and copy whatever I was working on to the new drive. Problem is if it fails and I need to open something from a long time ago that's a lot of fking blu ray discs to go through loll. With a several terabyte tape it'll take years to fill it up instead of just a few weeks and that wouldn't be a problem lolll

[@pointblank2890]

Ah so it's sort of like the difference between a dedicated external USB hard drive vs. an internal hard drive stuck into a USB HDD Dock? If the controller for the USB hard drive fails, it'd be tricky to get the data off of it. If the USB HDD Dock fails, you can jsut take out the Hard drive and stick in into another dock or into a computer case

[@mindtropy]

Yeah, but in general you transfer failed heads with a donated one. Not the platters

[@RockyX123]

This implies tape went away, which it didn't. Magnetic tape has always been the cheapest form of tertiary backup storage.

[@BurtonHohman]

To be fair it did go away for most consumers

[@williep098]

Exactly. The aviation industry is a big consumer of tape storage due to its long shelf life. Planes can stay in service for 50+ years and no digital storage method can reliably story data as long and as cheap as magnetic tape.

[@s1nnocense]

@@BurtonHohman and it will stay there, this is not about consumers tho.

[@ihcend]

​@@BurtonHohman and most consumers will still never interact with tape.

[@ailivac]

@@BurtonHohman When was it popular with consumers? The 1970s home computer era (where it was just a simple hack to take advantage of common audio tape equipment) for a few years between when computers weren't something consumers used at all and when floppy disks got cheap enough?

[@dorukhanarslan96]

"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway." -Andrew S. Tanenbaum

[@InventorZahran]

For moving extremely large amounts of data, physical transport is in fact more efficient than sending it over the internets!

[@dorukhanarslan96]

@@InventorZahran Yepp, that's why even Amazon AWS provides a tape backup solution called Tape Gateway. I think they can send a truck to your premises grab your tapes.

[@bengoacher4455]

My dad tells the story of how, in the 80s, he was sent from the UK to the USA with rolls of magnetic tape. Back before the internet and undersea cables. Turns out even today there is a critical mass where tapes traveling on a plane is faster than data traveling at light speed.

[@butsukete1806]

Back in the early warez days, mailing hard drives was fairly common.

[@Mezgrman]

Amazon has a service for that! Their biggest one is an actual truck, they call it AWS Snowmobile :D

[@mejones9145]

I’ve never had any problems keeping my scotch tape stored

[@ymodnar]

Same with duct tape.

[@livegolfismygt]

😑

[@abbycollins]

Yeah it’s in my desk drawer and I use it for hanging up prints hai is running outta ideas / silly

[@Sephiroth144]

Its finding it when you need it that's the problem...

[@PraxZimmerman]

You scotched your tape?

[@stevec00ps]

The whole "offline" storage thing that tape offers is a huge plus to protect your data against e.g. ransomware

[@jasondrummond9451]

Has given me ideas for using tape (rather than multiple portable hard drives) for offsite storage.

[@gteixeira]

Anyone can keep their external hard drives offline.

[@capricciocrypto]

As long as you‘re not encrypting the data and storing your encryption keys online.

[@tonysheerness2427]

Not if you backed up a virus.

[@gteixeira]

@@tonysheerness2427 Not if you use a system that is not compatible with that virus.

[@PatrickBaldwin1]

Tape never went away. It is good for backup but is not good if you are just wanting one piece of information off of it. They are to slow for anything but archival storage.

[@butsukete1806]

Backup and archiving are totally different purposes. Backup is to recover when your file server blows up. Archive is for old data that you still need to keep.

[@RepChris]

@@butsukete1806 Different yet very similar requirements. It doesnt need fast random access but it does need a lot of capacity. So tape works well for both for similar reasons.

[@Steamrick]

@@butsukete1806 If you don't archive your backups (GFS and 3-2-1 principles), you're doing it wrong. Tape is great for backup.

[@EebstertheGreat]

Tapes can also be used for hierarchical storage, where some files that you do intend to use later are still stored only to tape, because storing them anywhere else would be too expensive. Companies like Google sometimes need to store colossal volumes of data that they use only occasionally, and the only cost-effective solution is tape. A networked tape library basically acts like a really big and slow drive for this purpose, which is good enough.

[@RepChris]

@@EebstertheGreat Yup, for all the same reasons tape is great for archive and backup stuff

[@ryno101]

I’ve been in data storage since about 2000, and people have been predicting the death of tape as a backup media since then. I would always reply, the most bandwidth you will ever see is an Iron Mountain truck full of backup tapes going down the highway.

[@housellama]

Yeah, for mass storage, it's really hard to beat tape. It may be slow as hell (compared to SSD), but it's absolutely freaking MASSIVE.

[@supercellex4D]

a train with tapes, though...

[@TrueHolarctic]

​@liquidgecka if you put tape on the plane bandwidth goes up

[@the_expidition427]

Off to Iron Mountain this is able to be turned into a song

[@singletona082]

'What's your bandwidth?' 'Guy running across campus wit ha backpack full of tapes.' 'School bag or duffle bag?' 'Duffle.' 'Foot or campus transit?' 'Foot.' 'That's some nice bandwidth but hell on your carrier platform.'

[@arisukak]

My dad works in IT. A sales rep gave him a refrigerator magnet of a tombstone named Tape Storage that died in 2009. I get a good chuckle out of that.

[@gdclemo]

just don't put the refrigerator magnet on the door of the tape storage cabinet, it might turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

[@coemcoem7070]

​@@gdclemo not in 2009

[@Hotshot2k4]

I actually always wanted to know in simple terms how storage devices worked, and was never quite sure until now. Thanks for that side lesson!

[@SaloCh]

What lesson? I got too distracted by the clown

[@AltonV]

@@SaloCh it was somethin about magnets..... I think 🤔

[@blueeleephant6o4t]

@@SaloCh Same

[@AznPrzsn]

You mean the clown lesson?

[@Fe22234]

The only clowns I need to learn about magnets from is icp.

[@syliphn8638]

Here's an even more pressing question: Why is there stock footage of two scientists dancing around and tickling each others' heads?

[@cubicbanban]

We deserve to know!!!!!!

[@simonamyot-bourgeois6982]

That footage was amazing

[@soundscape26]

Oh that's an easy one... to be featured on an HAI video.

[@anaskhan4]

Timestamp please

[@n_core]

​@@anaskhan4 2:35 here

[@vale.antoni]

One very important note, is that the original application of magnetic tape was to store analogue signals, so the re-proliferation can mainly be chalked up to someone realising that tape can also store vast quantities of digital data, and that it is unparalleled, if access speed is not at all a consideration.

[@DanieleGiorgino]

Technology Connections just did a video on this

[@vale.antoni]

@@DanieleGiorgino The one with the PCM adapter?

[@DanieleGiorgino]

@@vale.antoni Yeah!

[@TheEulerID]

Tape never went away in the enterprise space, despite a lot of the nonsense spoken in the video. The industry has been well aware that tape can store vast amounts of data, and LTO is now on its 10th generation in 23 years of development.

[@johnclement5903]

Just for $#!ts & giggles, I picked up an old Quantum SuperDLT tape Carousel unit at a local electronics surplus store. Hooked it up to the big ol' Dell XPS Quad Core 2 tower my uncle left behind for me. Now I can rest assured knowing that All of my family's photos, video, music and software libraries will be archived for my great-great grandchildren!

[@EebstertheGreat]

I was just looking into robotic tape libraries recently. They are by far the largest data storage devices ever conceived of, supposedly reaching 2 exabytes (2 × 10¹⁸ bytes), enough to store over a quadrillion "standard pages" of uncompressed text, which is far more text than has ever been physically produced by humans. And it fits in a room. And it's automated. By the way, you missed an important detail about hard drives. Hard drives today don't just have a single platter like they used to. For instance, the WD 22 TB drive has ten platters of 2.2 TB each. So in a sense it's almost like buying ten drives, as most of the hardware can't be shared between platters. That's part of what contributes to its high cost (MSRP $600). The equivalent change for tape drives is making the tape thinner so more can be crammed in a single cassette. But just adding more length of tape to a cassette is far cheaper than adding additional platters to a hard drive.

[@User31129]

So as long as you're willing to sacrifice space, you could technically produce and sell say a 36 TB drive with 18 2 TB platters. It would be awfully tall by today's standards, but not as tall as say a 2000 era PC was.

[@EebstertheGreat]

@@User31129 You could, but if it doesn't fit into a 3.5" drive, no one will buy it.

[@imzjustplayin]

@@User31129 Or they could go back to 5.25" HDDs.

[@Angel2kinds]

I handle purchases for a decently sized hosting company, and we get our 20TB SATA HDDs for 200€ a pop. that's 220$ish. (and that's price for individual drive, without any bulk sale) it will take a while before we switch to a larger size model (standardized infra), so I don't really have a quote for 22TB model. You sure the MSRP is accurate?

[@EebstertheGreat]

@@Angel2kinds It's accurate. Most stores are selling them for 30-50% off the list price.

[@Sci_X1]

My hungry ass could never be trusted with tape based storage

[@piemonster11]

what does this mean

[@user-zb8tq5pr4x]

@@piemonster11 Apparently OP likes to munch on some magnetic tape every once in a while, what is there not to understand

[@ugh.idontwanna]

@@user-zb8tq5pr4x Maybe he means "ass" as in donkey? Livestock are known to be terribly unreliable when it comes to protecting data.

[@gmodiscool14]

Lol my alt has ur pfp

[@Xelopheris]

Magnetic tape has been around this whole time. It's been the most common form of storage for infrequently accessed data, which typically means backups. It will never become a standard level storage because access time can be huge, but thanks to automated tape libraries being able to insert the right tape and read to the right thing, you can store data that you might need later much cheaper than storing it in a format where it stays available. If you look at a cloud service, something like Amazon S3 has their standard tier on actual drives (HDDs or SSDs), but their Glacier format is infrequent access, which is on tapes. Getting those files off the tapes starts with a request to make them live, which starts a process where AWS copies the data off those tapes onto something for you to get it later. It's a pretty common practice.

[@OriginalGriff]

Hard drive sales also began to tank a few years ago because of the rise of SSDs which aren't susceptible to the superparamagnetic limit because they use transistors instead of a magnetic media. The largest SSD currently available has a capacity of 100 terabyte, and they are significantly faster than traditional HDDs. (They have other problems, but ... that's another video for you! :D ) Tapes are an effecitive solution, but only really for offline storage - online data needs much faster access than tape can provide. Good video though!

[@mdbizzarri]

As a DBA and former Tape Library supervisor, this is fascinating. I've now seen IT come full circle, from punch cards to tape, HDD, SCSI, floppy, zip, SDD, cloud, and now back to physical tape. One reel we used to have had 750 MB of data on 5 lbs of tape.

[@TheRealHarrypm]

Its more heading to Sony Optical Archive for cold stores now tbh less cost of ownership and future proofing issues non magnetic is a lot more safe and at 500GB a disc and 5.5TB a cartrage at 200USD its cost effective too.

[@Nalehw]

Looking forward to punch cards coming back. Any day now...

[@YouShookItThreeTimes]

​@@TheRealHarrypm 750 MB uses 5 pounds of tape storage is a really fascinating factoid you have brought up in my opinion. I recently transferred 30 GB of audio and video to a device and it made me think about how much tape that would require based on this and it really gave me a better understanding that I would need about 200 pounds of tape if this was going to be stored in this way.

[@PascalGienger]

I started my "career" with reel-to-reel 9 track tape - and it was really a factor of the record length how much data went into that tape because after each record it put a quite huge portion of unused tape - so the machine can find record number X by fast winding the tape and reading those record separators. It was even direct access - if you used a record as a block you could format it as a file system - this created that constant fast back-and-forth spinning to read arbitrarily chosen blocks. Those machines had a tape loop in nearly vacuum to be able to rapidly reverse fast winding movement without tearing the tape. That's why a glass window closed the area after mounting a tape and a pump pumped air out of it.

[@Berkeloid0]

@@NRGY Paper's great but for true longevity you should really be looking at stone tablets

[@davidrajchman7162]

You forgot to mention the super cool way tape archives work. The have just few readers and many "offline" shelf and there is a super fast robot that swaps the right tapes into the reader It's amazing to watch

[@stupidlogon888]

Even more fun when the robots get out of whack and start smashing the tapes into each other or launch them through the storage cells into the heavy metal frame.

[@StopMotionPotato33]

Feel like I should point out that some interesting physics stuff (plasmonic near field transducers) have also made hard drives much more dense over the last couple years, but aren't quite commercialized yet. Seagate just started selling 30 TB drives, and the plan is to release 60+ TB drives in 2026. Doesn't even touch the 9 PB theoretical capacity of tape, but the upper limit hasn't *quite* been reached.

[@ingobernoble2678]

It's interesting because Star Wars was made in the 70s they store info on "Data tapes". I always thought that was one aspect of that universe that seemed really dated but I guess they were right about that one

[@MarkTuson]

They also stored data on "tapes" in Star Trek, more than a decade earlier.

[@myself248]

It's also become a term for any recording, among folks who make and swap concert bootlegs. A "tape" of a concert might just be a FLAC file on solid-state flash memory and then whisked across the internet, but it's referred to by the term that started with the storage medium many decades ago. So perhaps, a long time ago in a galaxy far far away, they might've actually been using holographic crystal data storage, but because the alliance and the empire both had thriving concert bootleg scenes, everyone just called them tapes.

[@SoulSukkur]

HAI, 5:17 - "You're spending too much money on coffee!" Me, who is spending zero money on coffee - "You have my attention."

[@XLR8bg]

0:19: Clarification - it is the oldest "non-volatile" storage. If we are talking about computer data storage as a whole, then Wiliams Tube did come a lot earlier, it was basically the very first RAM (volatile storage).

[@kaitlyn__L]

And before then we had mercury delay lines! Volatile, but not randomly accessible. Worst of both worlds! Plus of course the first NVRAM is actually core memory.

[@Kevin-bm1gf]

How are punch cards not non-volatile storage? ;-)

[@TheMajorStranger]

Data storage is becoming a combined arms system. From tape to HDD to SDD to NVMe. They all have their use and will work together to achieve maximum storage and optimize access and cost.

[@Kevin-bm1gf]

You are correct in that these storage devices work in tandem depending on how "hot" the data is. The multi-tiered system is the main system used in the corporate world. "tape to HDD to SDD to NVMe" NVMe is actually a transport, not a storage device or technology. The comparison of NVMe is to SAS, Fibre Channel, parallel SCSI, SATA, iSCSI, etc.

[@TheMajorStranger]

@@Kevin-bm1gf I was mostly making the distinction between SATA SSD limited to 600 Mbps and PCIe Gen 4 NVMe SSD in form of M.2 expansion card which can achieve 7500 Mbps. Both are colloquially refered to Solid State Drive (because they are) but use different port. So don't be pedantic it was pretty clear what I was referring to this.

[@Appletank8]

Very convenient that Technology Connections talked about how tape was the best way to store massive amounts of audio tracks before HDDs

[@TestSpaceMonkey]

Was just going to post the same, I think he said 3-5GB on a VHS with mid 70's consumer technology depending on error correction. Typical consumers (other than those who needed to record multiple hours of digital audio) just didn't have the need for that much storage. I think a typical entry-level home computer from the era was still being programmed one byte at a time with switches on the front panel... kzbin.info/www/bejne/roTRo4R4m6d2sLs

[@darrylpioch2055]

You mean tape they would record on in a studio? That's a lot different than the type of tape they're talking about here (usually). The big 2-inch studio reels are all 24-track analog. the 1-inch reels are all 16-track analog. And most of the giant studio tape decks are analog. BUT there are some big reel to reel decks that are 48-track digital and record on a thinner special type of tape. Usually 1/4 inch. Some were 24-bit 48K. Those machines dreadfully SUCKED though. They were deathly sensitive to mechanical specs falling slightly out needing constant service and cost a quarter million new. After that DTRS became the standard for a long time which was a rack of digital 8-track machines that each recorded 8 tracks + a timecode track on an Hi8 tape and you could sync up to 16 of them together (and thus have ur session spread across 16 different tapes that all need to play at the same time lolll). That was a lot better as far as recording digitally in the 90s and early 2000s. Still today though a big percentage of popular music is recorded on 24-track for the character it adds

[@seporokey]

Platter hard drives are continuing to evolve past the ~22 TB limit as well. Our good ole disk drives are starting to use a technology called "Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording" (HAMR). The first consumer HAMR drives are set to release either end of this year or early next year and will be around 30 TB, with up to 50+ TB planned for the future. Edit: A word :)

[@mousermind]

*past the

[@kaitlyn__L]

Is that using locally applied heat to the curie point to magnetise a smaller area?

[@timmurray2945]

Tape storage is still a quite very common backup storage medium in I.T. Have worked in a few places where data backups would get backed up onto tape as a tertiary method of keeping the data, and the database could be restored from tape when/if needed. It's not uncommon at all for many companies to use this method to make sure that they always have a copy of the data somewhere incase it's ever needed.

[@h.mandelene3279]

True. You will rarely see a data restore request(99% of companies). The flexibility of taking TBs of data off site, version controls, legal archivals, you name it - its size in tape media and not risk having hardware on each cartridge that could potentially go bad, is the way to go.

[@michaelsanchez1361]

Tape was an excellent backup storage. Once a tape was dropped, the data still intact

[@zachx281]

The dancing clown was really useful for this one. You all should put it in more videos

[@anandsharma7430]

I see this as a startup idea. We need a tool to insert various dancing clowns, generated using Dall-E like AI/ML using famous artists' impressions of popular historical figures, to be our unique dancing clowns on every new youtube video. The age of spinners and progress bars is over, we all need Dancing clowns ! And you should be able to invest in the startup using NFTs made of the original dancing clown animations😁

[@osakanone]

I hated it and it made me change tabs. Its too distracting.

[@Clem-gk4ye]

@@osakanoneI feel like that’s a you problem

[@PascalxSome]

We used tape for offsite backups since ... 20 years now... It's for cold storage basically

[@PascalxSome]

@@busimagen Wasn't in the business back then, but yeah, it never was gone

[@jackkraken3888]

Magnetic tape has always been there but it was mostly for enterprise for backups. It's not great for instant retrieval but it can store a lot.

[@dhillaz]

The editor and animator nailed this video - very fluid and punchy. 👌

[@davetech1269]

Especially that clown, man

[@bredsheeran2897]

That clown in the bottom of the screen 💀 1:39

[@_GhostMiner]

Also another advantage of tape storage is that the device holding the tape has no moving parts (at least the normal/traditional tape cassettes and stuff) which means there's nothing to break inside the cassette that holds the data unlike on hard drives where if the mechanism that read and writes the data fails, you have to spend A LOT of money on getting the data recovered by some specialist. Also hard drives are very sensitive to physical damage, and pretty any movement while running.

[@Monsuco]

I used to work for NOAA years ago. We archived our weather and climate data on LTO6 tapes. Each tape held 2.5 TB. We would load them into the tape machine on trays with 10 tapes apiece meaning 25 TB at a time. The machine itself held 30 trays which means 300 tapes or 750 TB. A little robot inside the tape backup machine would prepare tapes to be loaded onto a shelf outside of the machine that held hundreds of other tapes and one of my jobs was to periodically feed the machine expired tapes that it could write over and take out tapes that our archive system said should be stored on the shelf or driven over to our off-site location.

[@connecticutaggie]

Tape does have two big limitations: 1) Unlike Hard Drives, tapes are a contact media so they wear and the process can also weaken/corrupt the stored information 2) Tape is rolled up so one layer of information (magnets) has another layer of information (magnets) above it and below it which can also weaken/corrupt the stored information over time (called plate-through).

[@Brando56894]

Yep, tape has a definite shelf life and needs to be protected from magnetic fields. My dad had a bunch of VHS-C tapes from the early 90s that he recorded of me, my brother, and our friends. They sat in a cabinet for about 20-25 years until I finally decided to digitize them last Christmas. Most of the tapes where digitally degraded. Some were an absolute loss, no audio, picture extremely fuzzy and tracking issues, etc... Some were ok the picture looked fine but the audio was messed up at points. I think part of the problem is that these were stored next to a 10 inch subwoofer that wasn't working the majority of that time, but the speaker magnet still produced a magnetic field.

[@MarkTuson]

Limitation 1 isn't relevant because it's not subjected to constant read-write cycles. The tape is recorded and then shoved in a vault out of sight until it's needed again. Limitation 2 (which is called *print-through*, not plate-through) is also not an issue if the recording medium has a high enough magnetic coercivity and the saturation isn't too high - both things being taken into account during the design of the recorders and the tapes because of the extreme density of the recording. Also, with modern digital tape using either helical or transverse scanning, any print-through that does occur is unlikely to overlap significantly enough to interfere with the actual signal.

[@connecticutaggie]

@@MarkTuson Are these systems used primarily for archive and backup?

[@nopenope4402]

Companies use tape for long term archive due to legal requirements. Most of the time they don't actually want the data restored, so it doesn't matter if the information gets corrupted..

[@PaulStompbox]

So now, Star Trek in 1966 predicted that the 23rd century computers on the Enterprise would use tapes, might not actually be an obsolete prediction after all.

[@divinelittledevil]

how is it an obsolete prediction? sounds accurate now! 😂

[@PaulStompbox]

@@divinelittledevil I realized I forgot to write the "not", my bad.

[@fredashay]

I'd love to have some kind of tape backup, but all tape systems are mad expensive! Some startup should have a cheap tape backup using audio cassettes and USB.

[@adamsfusion]

The key term here is "infrequent". Companies are rarely doing research via loading tapes because they're massive, slow to read, and require human intervention (generally). Companies (again generally) are storing information that's valuable, either dollar-wise or strategy-wise, but can't be acted upon, _OR_ because they're contractually/legally bound to store it for a long period. Tapes are selling more than mechanical hard drives, but not for the same purposes.

[@SeptemberMeadows]

Tape drives will evolve into Linear Pile systems, probably by the end of the decade with crazy multiple read/write heads. First version will literally be stacked (Pile) but circular versions will be on the scene soon after. The best ones will be kept in orbit with some serious shielding. What's old is new again but better 😉

[@r4sk3t96]

thanks for the clown editors, it was a really hard watch

[@unlink1649]

The editors of wendover are so fucking lazy they just add random pieces of stock footage and yeet it. It’s so painful how the production quality tanked

[@king_br0k]

3:26 that is the most disturbing clip of stock footage I have ever seen

[@tsbrownie]

To store more data on tape, you need either longer tape (bigger reels/lower storage density in the machine) or thinner tape (weaker/print thru/self erasure) or smaller "bits" (higher error rates). And that needs to work in a "dirty" environment. It has a 10 year "shelf life" (no use), or x number of passes (depending on tape and drive). Tape has always had its place as an offline/offsite backup. It **should** be safe from ransomware, fire/disaster, etc. BUT it becomes susceptible to theft and loss (ibm lost customer data when tapes fell out of the back of a truck).

[@SylvesterAshcroft88]

It would actually be pretty useful if you could load the tape into a tower like a cassette, which would load into memory similar to an ssd, or traditional hdd, so that could be pretty convenient if it was fast enough, as you could in theory just swap it out similar to how we used to use floppy disks.

[@butsukete1806]

It's called hierarchical storage management.

[@charredUtensil]

There are already robots that can pick specific tapes off a massive bookshelf and load them into a reader. Banks have been using this to store check images for decades. I believe one system from the 90s boasted it could load any individual check image within about 10 seconds. Remember, magnetic tape is really for archives - stuff you need to write continuously and then keep indefinitely, but very rarely do you ever have to go back and pull something off the shelf.

[@EebstertheGreat]

The way a robotic tape library works, you request a file, a robotic arm grabs the appropriate cassette and loads the entire thing into memory, and then you can access it and do whatever you want with it.

[@andybrice2711]

I think that's pretty much how it already works. You just rarely see those machines outside a data archive facility.

[@MylesSmith-q4y]

Imagine making Ultra HD Camcorders using Magnetic Tape Cartridges? It would feel like loading a film cartridge into a movie camera! Yeah bring it on.

[@HeisenbergFam]

1:22 its nice of you to tell editors to put a clown to keep us entertained. Either editors are held hostage or you pay them 6 figures

[@-ReynardFox]

Every comment I see of yours is such a lame take

[@Shiestey]

I can’t tell if this is a really sophisticated bot or just some guy that sits around waiting for notifications to bait top comments on every major channel

[@rennoc6478]

@@Shiestey probably the second

[@A.M.T.P.]

Fun Fact - CERN (Large Hadron Collider people, a little thing called the World Wide Web, and many others) still use tapes to store data. The reason is simple - tapes are much cheaper than magnetic disks, they contain several TB of data on one cassette, they last a very long time and, most importantly, they can read real data from tapes from 30-50 years ago thanks to the simplicity of this technology.

[@gradata]

When they migrate to larger tapes, they sell the old ones as souvenirs, with the data still on them.

[@rogerdickerson6924]

We we proud to deliver our tape and library systems to CERN for many years, maybe decades. They asked for some cool features that we designed for them, and then pushed out to other customers later. The thing about the track pitch in the video, 9 track was from the 70s. We actually had 36 bit heads that wrote 160 "wraps" along the tape surface. The tape was a lot shorter, but carried 5760 paralell magnetic tracks wide in the half inch width. 12TB uncompressed capacity, typical 3 to 1 compression. One version presented the tape as a removable USB storage, showed up in file manager same as a thumb drive...

[@jonas1015119]

there is a subplot to this which involves the weird standards of LTO tape storage systems and the fact they have extremely limited backwards compatibility. So while you can theoretically store them for a long time, they have a huge planned obsolescence problem and after 10+ years most facilities wont have the hardware necessary to read older tapes anymore, and you need to copy the entire archive over to the newer standard.

[@stagergamer4172]

I find it funny how humanity constantly alternates from discs to tape

[@CAPAE]

The question I have is, what about rewriting data? If you store something on a rotating disc, the magnetic poles can be rewritten by reversing the flow. Older magnetic tape technology was not good for rewriting anything that needed to be changed later. This is a more permanent solution if you are not going to change the data, but people update their files All the time. Before this becomes consumer standard, that is a hurdle that will need to be jumped over.

[@EebstertheGreat]

Modern magnetic tape can be easily rewritten many times. I think that was always the case. For instance, recording with a reel-to-reel system, VCR, or cassette player was just as fast as reading.

[@Dave01Rhodes]

Currently, tape is usually rewritten in full every time. Tape drives are really fast for reading and writing sequentially, so it’s not a big deal to do that. One of the ways they increased tape data density was shingling the tracks, which means writing to an earlier track is likely to overwrite a later track. So they either never rewrite any of the tape, or rewrite the entire tape when they back up, depending on their needs. But you’re right, it’s never going to become a consumer standard. Most consumers will never need that much data storage.

[@No-mq5lw]

Thing is that tape might never be a consumer standard. There was a product in the late 90s called the Backer by Danmere that promised to allow you to store 3GB of data on a cheap VHS tapes, which never took off. Though I think that's in large part because there was no brains in the device to control the VHS, and you had to fiddle around with the deck and the software to get it just right. Flash is just too cheap, getting cheaper, and is good enough for consumer use.

[@EebstertheGreat]

@@No-mq5lw There were also digital audio tape players in the 80s, and those weren't very successful. They wrote digital LPCM audio to beta or VHS tapes and could store a tremendous amount. Data is data, so instead of audio, you could presumably store any other digital data there if you wanted to. But it was quite expensive, and not many people needed so much data back then (except studios, which sometimes used U-matic tapes for digital storage).

[@TheRealHarrypm]

LTO/SAIT2 tape has been standard for the last 2 decades, now optical archival like M-Disc on the consumer side and Sony Optical Archive is replacing it due to long term cost of duplication and risk of loss in a flooding or thermal event being smaller and endurance goes from 30 years to 100+ years.

[@janno288]

This is factually incorrect on so many levels. - Tape storage was never abandoned - Tape storage continued to advance - Archival processes do not need fast access to data - Datacenteres for online services like Amazon will not adopt tape drives due to slow performance.

[@bluevanimaging9998]

Very interesting that magnetic tape is still used for data back-up, acually makes a lot of sense for cost alone, plus being able to move media and its stored data to an off-site location in case something happens to your data centre. On a personal note, you've made me go and look at my old video and audio casette collections now!

[@supernenechi]

General public getting to know that tech like this is still getting used is funny xD Yup, in datacenters, it's still great for high high density storage where you don't need to read often. Perfect for a long term backup! Also, cool video! Love the fact you explain in much more detail about the technical stuff!

[@blipadouzi]

As a pedantic side note, 9000 Terabytes is called 9 Petabytes.

[@xandersnyder7214]

Tape has never gone anywhere, every company I have worked at for the last 25 years have used tape, because it's cheap and efficient. I even run LTO-5 tapes at home for backups in my homelab.

[@ddm.coment.o]

¡Gracias! This is the type of unexpected info I need

[@maximilianmorse9697]

How did he not mention flash storage even once?

[@matthewprather189]

It's not super relevant for large archives like he was describing

[@Platonic_fish]

Flash storage sucks for long term unless you are keeping it powered

[@thederiver]

"but it's interesting because the different box is old" really got me 😂

[@uvbe]

2:35 where do you even find this stock footage lmao

[@gljames24]

What!? Hard drives can push way past 22TB with the new HAMR technology. Tape is already in the petabyte, but is way slower to access and is used for longterm storage. HAMR drives are reaching 60TB and beyond and are great for server storage. It's the same reason why we don't use SSDs for ram even though they are much larger and more stable.

[@Steamrick]

You're talking future tech as if it was now. HAMR has yet to show anything that PMR cannot do. Don't get me wrong, I fully believe that HAMR is the future of HDD technology, but it's not the present of HDD technology just yet.

[@BoogsterSU2]

brb gonna buy a 9000TB tape storage drive to replace my old HDD on my laptop

[@mistershirokov5067]

I worked at a Data Centre and yes, some companies actually had those boxes with tapes (it’s like a glass cube where you can select a tape and the machine would take it). Fun fact: once a client asked if we had a magnetic room for storing those tapes; we didn’t (Tier 3 only) but it would be interesting to see one.

[@elliot9634]

the zoomer retention clown has me losing it

[@davetech1269]

As an ADD man I find it difficult choosing such try to focus on

[@cconnors]

The B-Roll for this video is hilarious. Good job editor/producer.

[@CosmoBurst]

Clown was pretty entertaining ngl

[@amandah8258]

The visuals and editing in this one were *chef's kiss*

[@endeyfire]

ayo? half as intresting has all his vids on tape?

[@ahadmrauf]

2:36 Now that looks like a fun photo shoot 😎. Sad, every time I wore a bunny suit was in a boring, stale clean room, I wish I got to take mine out for fun dance scenes like this back in undergrad.

[@BlakeB415]

LTO tapes have been around for a while and are used for archival. This isn't anything new.

[@azdrifter3968]

When my best friend and I were about 9 or 10 and my little brother was about 6 or 7, in the earlier 90's, we realized the boom box I got for Christmas has a mic built in. It was a few little holes in an indentation on the front of the stereo. We didn't know why, so we put a blank tape into the 2nd cassette deck, the one that records, and pushed play/record and started talking into the mic. Sure enough, it recorded our voices onto tape. We thought it was the greatest thing. We created a radio show, complete with scripts and interviews with friends. Songs were added into it all. And we had whole cassettes full of our "radio shows". Years later when I was around 18 or 19, I was digging around the shed going through old boxes of stuff from when me and my brother were kids and found the tapes. Our family had moved years ago and I had lost touch with all my old friends long ago. I put one in and it brought back so many memories. Hearing my friends voices. Hearing my own and my brother's from years back. I had completely forgot about the tapes years back, but suddenly I could remember writing the scripts and brainstorming ideas for the show I'm listening to. I spent all day listening to those tapes. I still have them at my moms house, and they still play and sound good. I'm 41 years old now and those tapes are the best pieces of my past I probably have. I thought about even burning them to CD's. Maybe one day I will.

[@Kevin-oj2uo]

I am data hoarder and this is true! Everyone is talking about Tape Storage

[@repatch43]

FWIW, I recently 'got into' tape to fulfill the 'backups shouldn't be on the same type of media' issue. It's still amazingly expensive for what it is, but I found a 'sweet spot' with LTO4, where if you're crafty you can find drives with HBA and cable for around $100-$150. It's only 800GB in capacity per cartridge, and it doesn't benefit from the LTFS option available on LTO5 and beyond, but for my home lab purposes it works well enough. Feels VERY retro using tape, last time I used it was in the early '00s at my workplace. And using 'tar' for what it was originally designed for is kinda neat!

[@gvfc]

Except tape storage never really went away.

[@44official]

Ofc Hard Disc Drives sales went down because SOLID STATE DRIVES (SSD) are now new norm and often REQUIREMENT for some latest Video Games.

[@zyansheep]

1:44, no I don't got it, there was a frickin clown in the corner distracting me!!!

[@Cablebet]

He told you it would happen

[@brianmaday9227]

"That different box is old." Such refreshing honesty.

[@zukaro]

Honestly I love tape storage it's really cool (even if I don't use it myself because while the tapes may be cheap the read/write machines certainly aren't). It'll also likely be incredibly useful for connectomics (since connectomics deals with massive datasets).

[@Dave01Rhodes]

The nice thing about LTO is that it’s been a standard for this entire century. The 18TB LTO9 tapes are out of any individual’s price range, but LTO4 or 5 can be had pretty cheaply if you want to play around with it.

[@johnmckown1267]

Ah, the joys of tape. I started on IBM S/370 mainframes. With 3420 "round reel" tapes. Back then, many files were designed to be read sequentially. So your master account file would be on a set of tapes (yes, multiple tapes). The "keypunch" people would put update information on an 80 column physical card. We'd run a "batch job" which would read the tape and card (both sorted in the same order). When the "key" one the tape record matched the one on the card, the in storage record would be updated. The tape record, updated or not, would then be written onto another, output, tape. Of course the card input could indicate to create a new record or delete an old one. A deletion simply meant don't written the in storage to the new output tape. You haven't known fear like having a tape break. Well, maybe you have when you accidentally deleted a file and emptied the trash can in Windows. But the fun was the fact that the tape drives were stupid. If the tape broke, the tape motor would continue on, taking all the tape off the reel.

[@bluevanimaging9998]

I started on IBM 370s as well. (1980 I think). Yeah, punch cards, tapes and removable platters from multi-disk drives. Plus programming on paper sheets, then getting code punched up - and putting JCL cards fore and aft of the deck - don't drop it! Too many stories, but very interesting to know that magnetic tape is still being used for back up storage, makes sense actually.

[@MozartTheGOAT]

Still probably faster than that HDD that I have in my PC since 1774

[@diyargungor]

As a European $7 for a coffee seems kinda very expensive (around 2.5€ here in Belgium and for a very good quality, but yeah I have seen some company using 30Tb tape storage for archive which they send to a bank for off-site storage backup weekly.

[@Udmudmudm]

In Italy,now,1,20 €....!!!

[@diyargungor]

@@Udmudmudm Really ?! I am a bit surprised by the difference and also 1,20 € is so much less expensive. I think it is above 2€ since long time here...

[@Udmudmudm]

@@diyargungor i living in One turist Town, Diano Marina, Liguria,near Sanremo and Montecarlo (Riviera dei fiori)and 1,2 € Is max cost of One espresso, but there Is the Little bars Whit same quality at One euro!

[@1.4142]

Nah, glue stick storage is the future.

[@robo-joe6111]

Data brokers after I unleash glue-eating kids into their glue stick data storage: 😡

[@personsandro]

LOL the editing and script are absolutely hilarious. Kudos.

[@lzh4950]

A disadvantage I read about tape backup though is that each time the read head rubs against the tape to read/write/erase data, friction between the two wears out the tape, so after ~45x backups the tape is so worn that it might lead to data on it being unreadable & thus corrupted

[@Mertaktas93]

This *AMZT66* needs to be claimed. I know it's strange and not expected at this channel but you can understand this within minutes and then you also know why all the likes go towards it

[@johnbillings5260]

Cons: rot if not stored properly, long seek times Depending on how it stores the data it could force a scan of all writes to the tape to build the file structure to find a file within, but more than likely it would be a WORM device not meant to keep adding data to.

[@thinking-laaf]

It's a known behavior. Tapes are stored into very dry climate controlled environments, like salt mines.

[@JokeswithMitochondria]

Out of context but pierce brosnan is so handsome

[@baatosanyo]

Tape never went away and they never stopped developing it.

[@FacterinoCommenterino]

Today's Fact: In 2020, researchers used quantum entanglement to teleport information between two chips in a silicon-based system, a major step forward for quantum computing.

[@matthewday7565]

Ye olde tape reels used multitrack heads, and were one way, you placed a fresh spool, crossed your fingers the autoload would work, and then it wrote the tap in one pass and then rewound (be kind. rewind). DAT/DDS tape systems used helical scan, same way a video tape works. QIC and DEC DLT use(d) a serpentine method where a narrow head writes the data one way, then steps and writes the next, like a cross between 8- track cartridge and an auto-reverse cassette. One thing that would theoretically be possible with serpentine recording would be to index the tracks, so a piece of data could be retrieved by a single pass after stepping to the correct track. The logical extension of HDD technology into tape may well end up with the tape flying under the head (like the disk in a bernoulli box) and with active tracking to allow increased track density

[@vylbird8014]

It's not just theoretical: LTFS does exactly that, indexing the tracks to keep seek times manageable.

[@2Manchester]

Love the 🤡, we need more Cameo of him in future episode.

[@kharadinbrahman]

don't know about those wide tapes , but the home computers of 80s actually did not record straight 0s and 1 onto tape, but used modulation/demodulation like dial up modems, and there was frequency modulation, not sure about amplitude modulation, and phase modulation also. some systems had information written in blocks and a checksum would follow, and duplicate blocks in case of any damage/ deterioration of part of a tape...

[@TheEulerID]

Tape never went away in the corporate space. We used it for very long term archival store, backup and journalling. These were very rarely accessed, but there were monumental amounts of data on them which had to be stored cheaply and without burning up megawatts of power. There were ways of doing data recovery, like snapshots, that were much faster, but you still need a multi-generational backup of last resort as who knows if and when some malware or software bug will mangle everything on-line. Often this stuff has to be kept off-site too (although replicating to a fall-back site and backing up remotely to tape there can avoid that). The power issue was also very real. Disks don't take kindly to powered up and down, and keeping multiple petabytes on disks running all the time is prohibitively expensive. There is also another problem with disks, and that performance doesn't scale well. If the linear data density is doubled, that means areal density quadruples. Unfortunately, sequential access only goes up with linear density. That means that the time taken to read and write and entire disk has got longer, and longer, and longer as the capacity does up. Once it was possible to read or write the entire content of a disk in a few tens of minutes. With the biggest disks now, you are talking of a couple of days. I should add that the performance bottleneck on random access is far, far worse than that, but that's a different discussion and the resolution for that is, of course, SSD. Tape isn't immune to these I/O bottlenecks wither, as they do have the same issues with regard to linear vs areal density ratios. However, unlike disk, it is feasible to have multiple read-write heads accessing multiple tracks simultaneously. That means that an LTO-10 drive can theoretically read and write uncompressed data at 1,100 MBps. That's several times faster than any disk. Of course, you can RAID HDDs and get more throughput that way, but you can (kind of) do something comparable with tape. So even the claim that tape is a lot slower than disk is wrong, at least in the space where tape matters, which is very high capacity, sequentially accessed data. I would also question the claim that money hasn't been spent on tape storage. It has, although the manufacture is even more concentrated than with HDDs. Back in about 2000, I was responsible for installing the first LTO-1 drive in the company I worked for (replacing more proprietary tape storage). Then it stored a modest 100GB per cartridge (uncompressed) with a throughput of 20 MBps (uncompressed). Now, LTO-10 has cartridges with 360 times the capacity and 55 times the throughput. Of course, not as much was spent as on HDD or SSD development, b In any event, I recall telling people 20 years ago that tape will outlive HDDs. I'm even more confident that is true now. A further 4 generations of LTO have been slated. IBM's Diamondback uses LTO-9 drives, not the ancient 3590 shown in this video. However, IBM also have a family of drives derived from that family aimed at mainframes with comparable capacity and performance. As is often the case, videos like this are from the perspective of consumer computing, not of large enterprises and data centres.

[@Techreux]

As a former Ampex Jr. Engineer, from decades ago, I can only add that as long as temp and humidity are maintained..well.. it MAY be possible to make tape store for longevity.. but, trust me, I have 50 Y/O tapes that are barely holding together. Running some of these through the tape transport clog up the heads and guides and capstan pretty majorly.. so.. I'm not convinced it's a "forever" storage.. otherwise, great video for non-engineering types!

[@Gutsquasher]

The reason there are 7 or 9 tracks for 6 or 8 bits is because they'll have an extra parity bit for basic error correction.

[@RingoBuns]

I love the editing on this one. Super fun.

[@StopChangingUsernamesYouTube]

Tape's always made sense even if it's weird to grasp at times as an individual, though it did briefly make some sense to me for my personal work. Hard drives are cheap but relatively unreliable, power-hungry and sensitive to vibration and tilt, and performance varies widely depending on whether the data you want in the moment can be accessed as a contiguous chunk. SSDs are expensive but potentially can last for decades...if you get a good controller chip and happy NAND, if there isn't a ton of data churn happening, and if you're _really_ willing to pay for that sort of reliability when you're already paying out the nose per GB. Tape is cheap as water per gig compared to either, sensitive to magnetic fields like HDDs, sensitive to other environmental factors that affect both, insensitive to vibration and tilt...unless it was a severe nudge mid-read/write, maybe, and a tape cartridge can sit in a box for decades. Drawbacks there are its purely sequential access and that while the tapes might be cheap, the drives certainly aren't. They make more sense on corporate scales, where the power cost of continuously spinning up a rack of hard drives and replacing failed drives factors in. It's still not what I'd call a real archival medium because the tape itself will eventually break down, but people have been chasing that for decades to the point of developing crazy stuff like M-disk.

[@sockpastarock7082]

I think another big element is - for the use case of "archiving" data the speed at which you can retrieve that archived data is not the most important factor. The main factor is simply that the data is safely retained somewhere and can be retrieved in the future. So even though tape may take much more time to retrieve the data in question, that's not a meaningful drawback in many cases.

[@synthoelectro]

knowing you have a one shot place to get your old data is piece of mind.

[@Mike__B]

Remember back when we had hard drives that were rated in MEGAbytes it was pounded into our head "you should backup your data regularly!" which is where a lot of these tape systems came into being for consumers, then as hard drives got bigger the mantra of "Backup!!!" become less and less frequent, now any sort of backup involves only your important files because we realized everything else can be reinstalled.

[@troysvisualarts]

Interesting to see magnetic tape making a comeback! I was a 90s kid-teen so I primarily used 5.25 & 3.5" floppy disks and hard drive on my PC back then so I missed the data tape era.