With that modern LLMs are capable of I'n seriously considering investing in at least M-DISC storage or similar to store stuff I don't want to lose :). It's unlikely that both iCloud and Synology get hacked at the same time, but the probability is higher than I could imagine before.
Yeah, the back-compat story for LTOs is not great. They are going to try and improve it starting with LTO-10.
It was partially on purpose for the earlier LTO generations. The capacity/speed ratio was not too high, so you could just keep upgrading your library in the background every decade. It outweighed the complexity of designing backwards-compatible hardware.
But it's becoming less practical now. LTO-4 is 1.6Tb with 160Mb read speed, so each tape takes just about 3 hours to read. LTO-10 is 40Tb with 400Mb read speed, resulting in more than 24 hours of time to read one tape.
Drive availability is an interesting question in itself. Laser drivers are pretty complicated beasts themselves that require highly precise mechanics. Tape drives are much simpler, because the areal information density is about 3 orders of magnitude smaller than on optical media.
The mechanical stuff that loads and unloads the tape and keeps it in tension is crazy, but it's all just regular "macroscopic" parts that can be custom-manufactured if needed.
LTO-9 increased track density, increased the total number of tracks by reducing their width and increased linear density.
The "how" certainly does not sound "much simpler" to me ?[1]
The new, narrower track width was achieved through a combination of improvements in tracking
performance, new, narrower tunneling magnetoresistive (TMR) readers within the head assembly
(now <1000nm in width) and optimized writers. The narrower tracks also necessitated
improvements to the media magnetic layer. Magnetic particles are Barium Ferrite (BaFe) as in LTO-8, but with
improved characteristics to support the higher linear densities.
Changes were also made to the tape substrate, with the thickness reduced by 7% from 5.6µm to
5.2 µm. This in turn enables more tape to fit on the reel – tape length per cartridge has
increased from 960m to 1035m. The new substrate also features optimized stability
characteristics to mitigate tape dimensional variations that occur due to fluctuations in
environmental conditions.
In addition the LTO Program's own technical paper describes how LTO-9 manages dimensional changes in the new substrate with a one-time-per-tape calibration algorithm to control 32-channel recording via closed-loop servo algorithms, plus a longer-block Reed-Solomon C2 code — together getting LTO-9's uncorrectable bit error rate to 10⁻²⁰, a 10× improvement over LTO-8[2]
With that modern LLMs are capable of I'n seriously considering investing in at least M-DISC storage or similar to store stuff I don't want to lose :). It's unlikely that both iCloud and Synology get hacked at the same time, but the probability is higher than I could imagine before.
How does this compare vs Microsoft’s Project Silica? Available for purchase being the immediate differentiator, but curious how they fare technically.
https://unlocked.microsoft.com/sealed-in-glass/
We where just talking about tape and other long term back up for Langrange Point Cloud. Fun to see the lasers.
So it's like a tape library, but for 1Tb optical disks?
I think a tape library still wins. LTO-9 allows 18Tb on one tape (without compression) and LTO-10 is 30/40Tb
And tape is going to be fine, as long as it's kept in reasonable conditions. No need to do clean rooms to store it or anything like that.
The tricky bit, especially for the small operater is keeping a working drive as long as you want to keep the storage.
Yeah, the back-compat story for LTOs is not great. They are going to try and improve it starting with LTO-10.
It was partially on purpose for the earlier LTO generations. The capacity/speed ratio was not too high, so you could just keep upgrading your library in the background every decade. It outweighed the complexity of designing backwards-compatible hardware.
But it's becoming less practical now. LTO-4 is 1.6Tb with 160Mb read speed, so each tape takes just about 3 hours to read. LTO-10 is 40Tb with 400Mb read speed, resulting in more than 24 hours of time to read one tape.
Drive availability is an interesting question in itself. Laser drivers are pretty complicated beasts themselves that require highly precise mechanics. Tape drives are much simpler, because the areal information density is about 3 orders of magnitude smaller than on optical media.
The mechanical stuff that loads and unloads the tape and keeps it in tension is crazy, but it's all just regular "macroscopic" parts that can be custom-manufactured if needed.
> Tape drives are much simpler
Maybe back in the 90's :)
LTO-9 increased track density, increased the total number of tracks by reducing their width and increased linear density.
The "how" certainly does not sound "much simpler" to me ?[1]
In addition the LTO Program's own technical paper describes how LTO-9 manages dimensional changes in the new substrate with a one-time-per-tape calibration algorithm to control 32-channel recording via closed-loop servo algorithms, plus a longer-block Reed-Solomon C2 code — together getting LTO-9's uncorrectable bit error rate to 10⁻²⁰, a 10× improvement over LTO-8[2][1] https://at.ingrammicro.eu/api/cfs/Icecat/PDF.ashx?l=en&s=957... [2] https://www.lto.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/LTO-UBER-Tech...
The video says they use 200GB Blu-ray media. Is this something new?