news.com.com — Researchers at IBM's Almaden Research Center and Fuji Photo have devised a prototype storage system utilizing a dual-side magnetic tape that can hold 6.67 billion bits of data per square inch. That's 15 times greater than most popular types of magnetic tape on the market today.
May 16, 2006 View in Crawl 4
johnnybravohMay 16, 2006
Then your backup software/configuration sucks and your administrators aren't checking their logs. If you really have the best of the best hardware/software then tapes *will* work very reliably. It's not the tapes fault that the administrators are coasting and not checking logs and doing periodic test restores.
scheperMay 16, 2006
Or you could use Google search for "6.67 billion bits to megabytes":
Closed AccountMay 16, 2006
"you do not understand the concept of data backup"I didn't see him mention anything about data backup, the only thing i saw him mention was using tapes as the main form of storage, and he's right, it would be slow.
neshMay 16, 2006
@ soulpunisher:You're not at all worried about the transportation of HDD media on/off site everyday? What about any bumps that could happen in transport? I understand that you're running a RAID 5, but dang man, sounds risky to me.I don't mean to bash your policies, but I'd be a little concerned about an administrator that thinks it's more convenient / reliable to take home a 20lb NAS device every night rather than spending the time to tweak his backup so the jobs don't fail.
fugitivalienMay 16, 2006
I still don't see any actual numbers in terms of native and compressed capacity for the media, and how is the drive working? What kinds of throughput speeds does it see? Tape is still THE best for your typical mid-enterprise level archival storage. Right now there are super fast and large backup media available on the market today (STK's/Quantum 10000 -- 1TB per tape for example) but it still begs the question how fast can you send data to the drive? This is very important because backups will not be efficient because tape drives have to stream data to tape, think buffer underruns when burning a CD or DVD. Real world you'll see about a 10% bad media threshold, compare that with disc or disk mediums. But i wish i could just wheel a SAN array and store that offsite ;)
tylerdurden0May 16, 2006
Tapes fail - simple as that. However, despite that, they are cheap and small. Those proclaiming that they have never seen a tape fail are doing far too few backups. We use a quality brand and still find that they have a failure rate of 1%, which is excellent. Just don't tell me it does not happen.