holy shiat bags, what memories seeing the old commie brings back.

/Spy Hunter
//Wizard
///Space Taxi
////on and on and on and on...

No one else went WTF when the article said "hard drives will be able to store 3 TB of data in a decade" besides me?

They can do that NOW - in fact they have larger ones than that now. They are not even that expensive.

In 10 years time... I don't dare speculate but I would be very surprised if my porno collection is not in the multi-PB range at that point.

Lady Beryl Ersatz-Wendigo: Ah, my old TRS 80, where are you now?

CASS?

After reading through this thread, I'm going to look into LTO-5 for the office. Thanks, thread!

Also, if anyone has recommendations for drives to buy and cartridges to look into, let me know. I only need a basic system for storing cheap, reliable data. Nothing fancy.

Yeah. No it's not.

Jesus, you people.

Labrat407: Behold the glory of the first PC I used in school!

Admiral Kirk has one.
http://starringthecomputer.com/feature.html?f=29

No, tapes aren't "coming back". Tape data storage has been around since forever.

And no, tape is in decline. There are labour and time costs with tape that aren't there with say, backing up to a remote server. OK, if you're backing up 35TB of data, tape may make sense, but for most businesses, even very large ones, they don't actually have that much data. I used to work for a telco, and we had a DB with millions of bills each month (to a transaction level), and it would all fit on a $50 hard drive.

Oh, please do return. I miss terribly the days of CLOAD and ** and * and routine errors because the volume needed continual adjustment.

/trs-80 model 1, biatches

KarmicDisaster: "Current projections by the trade body Information Storage Industry Consortium show that although hard drives will be able to store 3 terabytes a piece in a decade's time,"

Huh? In a decade? I can buy a 3 TB drive right now from newegg. Are they these metric terabytes or something?

emphasis mine.

I think this article is nothing but an incredibly subtle advertisement for NewEgg. I think everybody went there to check on the highest capacity hard drive they could buy.

Are they talking about the next generation of STK1R tapes?

/Still prefer DASD.

This is the type of tape drive I think they are talking about.

Those tapes can take a full beating without problems. When I worked in a tape library (back when people could smoke inside the data center) people would throw them over walls to get tossed in a storagetek silo, if one broke open you could just reel the tape together, snap it back closed and it was good to go. Fun times.

/Many places still use tape storage.

For $300 (Which is about what I paid for a 212 meg drive in 1993, IIRC) you can get a 4TB drive. In 19 years, capacity/price has gone up 20,000 times. IIRC (yes again) 10 years ago 30 gigs was all the rage. So, drive capacity has gone up about 133 times every decade for the same price. (212 mb * 133 = 28 gb ; 28 gb * 133 = 3.7 tb)

In 10 years you should be able to get a half-petabyte drive for $300. Give or take.

Yotto: For $300 (Which is about what I paid for a 212 meg drive in 1993, IIRC) you can get a 4TB drive. In 19 years, capacity/price has gone up 20,000 times. IIRC (yes again) 10 years ago 30 gigs was all the rage. So, drive capacity has gone up about 133 times every decade for the same price. (212 mb * 133 = 28 gb ; 28 gb * 133 = 3.7 tb)

In 10 years you should be able to get a half-petabyte drive for $300. Give or take.

It's actually closer to 140 times, but that's still in roughly the same range (560 terabytes instead of just about 500). I do maths good.

optikeye

"You see, way back in the day...RIAA didn't like cassettes and people making mix tapes. So a compromise was reached. When you purchased a blank cassette a portion of the purchase goes to the RIAA....so you could legally make copies to share, give away etc. (not to sell or profit from tho). Because you already paid the RIAA fee in the purchase of the cassette."

Yeah, though it didn't stop them from stamping this on the inner sleeves of records:



And it didn't stop them from acting like taping an album was a felony tantamount to raping a child. Greedy pricks.

That was an unbelievably good troll if I ever seen one.

Tape are only worth anything for backup storage, and not, nor ever been for actual active data.

Anyone worth anything as far as computer knowledge goes, would know this.

Dinjiin: jfarkinB: Not if you've got the right RAID arrangement, with the right filesystem deployed on it.

IMHO, it still doesn't meet the same level of resiliency as tape. I've seen a drive in an array go bad, only to discover that a second drive had bad blocks during the rebuild, causing the rebuild to fail. And unless your filesystem has some advanced snapshoting features, you can still fark things up by inadvertently deleting files. And even that won't fix this:

newfs /dev/amr0

if you meant this:

newfs /dev/amr1

Ooops.

If whomever had that system didn't have a clue I would say, as you do not rely on a single RAID array if you have a single clue (considering the importance of the data), Anyone with an once of intelligence would have a minimum of a secondary redundant array if not two.

Heck, just for my files at home (pictures, music, documents and other personal stuff) I have a minimum of three copies.

With 2TB back at 100$, one would have to be a heel of a cheapskate or too poor to even have a system worth having, if they don't have a few backups.


And as far as power consumption goes, with low power drives and sleep mode, the power requirements are much lower than they used to be.

blahpers: RedPhoenix122: EatenTheSun: I would play the shiat out of some Micro League Baseball right now.

I'll see your Micro League Baseball and raise you Archon.

[i.imgur.com image 320x200]

Sorry boys, thanks for playing. *reaches for the pot*

/what happened, Electronic Arts?
//you used to be cool

At least we're getting a sequel via Kickstarter.

President Merkin Muffley: cyberuck: potentially moving tape backup technology into the quasi-primary storage realm.

It's exactly like that if you have no idea what primary storage is and like pulling things out of your ass.

Tell that to IBM. That's how they're pitching it - primary storage. NOT backup.

Tape drives never really went anywhere. You might not see them in home offices anymore but they're alive and well in data centers. I share some raised-floor lab space with a robotic tape library used for enterprise backups. Completely automated. Seems the only time a human's presence is required is when tapes are transferred to an offsite storage facility for archival. About once per day you see sysadmins pushing a cart of tapes to be taken for archival. Other than that, the robot seems pretty self-sufficient. Pretty facinating to watch.

tdyak: Are they talking about the next generation of STK1R tapes?

No, I think it's only available on DVD now.

CLOADM

How many admin (and even home users) religiously make backups but never test them? I've seen epic fail where folks make all kinds of backups but never tried to to a test restore from even a small random sample.

MrBentor: How many admin (and even home users) religiously make backups but never test them? I've seen epic fail where folks make all kinds of backups but never tried to to a test restore from even a small random sample.

Many home users backup to recordable optical media. The more common authoring programs have "verify after burn". It is fairly easy to turn it on. Most people I know use it because you can always get a bad batch of discs.

So I would guess it is fairly common to test them.

I still have a working C64 with the original Might & Magic on floppy.... and a very large map of "Varn" painstakingly mapped out by hand with colored pencils on sheets of graph paper taped together and pasted to a cardboard backing.

If they bring this back, I'm sold:

Dinjiin: MrBentor: How many admin (and even home users) religiously make backups but never test them? I've seen epic fail where folks make all kinds of backups but never tried to to a test restore from even a small random sample.

Many home users backup to recordable optical media. The more common authoring programs have "verify after burn". It is fairly easy to turn it on. Most people I know use it because you can always get a bad batch of discs.

So I would guess it is fairly common to test them.

Anyone still using CD/DVD for backups need to wake up and move forward and get a real-time backup system that would be need to be nothing more than a external drive and a proper software.

CD/DVD have been the worse piece of crap when it comes to being used as backups. The failure rate of these disks have been much (MUCH) higher than the claims have been.

Most disks I've dealt with have proven to be unreliable after just a couple of years, regardless of the brand., regardless of the fact that they were tested and shown to be working fine, regardless of the promise of 10 years minimum stability by the manufacturers.

I used to burn a minimum of 2 disks when there was no real alternatives, and the moment that external drives (and enclosures became available), I jumped ship, as even with two backups, I still had my share of losing data thanks to both disks going bad at a really bad time (and regardless that I'd even go and use different brands and/or batches to prevent getting a bad sequential set of disks).

Nicholas D. Wolfwood: "... a cartridge 10 cm x 10 cm x 2 cm."

Sorry, that's not a 'cassette'. Sounds like an Ultrium LTO cartridge, or a variant thereof.

LTO-5 already puts 1.6 TB on a cartridge, native. With nominal 2:1 compression, it's 3.2 TB.

I'm not sure what your definition of 'cassette' is, but the formal definition has nothing to do with size.

And you all laughed.

Slackfumasta: If they bring this back, I'm sold:

[upload.wikimedia.org image 512x512]

Link

enjoy

OLD CS1