Tape is here to rescue big data
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 25 ก.ค. 2019
- Tape is a technology most of us stopped using decades ago, but now preserves some of the world’s most important data.
This week Quartz News travels to Switzerland to understand why tech companies and research institutions like CERN, the largest particle physics lab in the world, rely on massive libraries filled with magnetic tapes.
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It's not making a come back... it never been gone =)
Alexandre Schrammel correct tape backups have been widely used in enterprise for decades
Very true. Tape has been a staple for long term storage for years
Tape backup is in use everywhere, and has been for a while.
and in 1970 home computers were using 1gb tapes ... wtf
@joyela aeuvunya is it? did the DoD finally stop using floppies on some of the old equipment?
Only downside is tapes random read or write speed is horrible. Good for backups tho
great for cold storage
i don't think anybody was suggesting using tapes for anything other than storage, in this day and age - they're an archival medium now
@@dancrocker9318 which is what it is meant to be used for these days, hence the video you just watched.
@@Casablancasky you must have a very big brain
Tape random read be like....i need to put a few video clips on a timeline, 20minutes.....later
I think this is giving a very false impression. Tape is not used for storing the data, like on your laptop -- it's used for archiving. The purpose of these tape backups is for if the primary storage method fails
Thats basically what they are saying
So literally what the video is saying? You’re just nit picking word choice that means the same thing and gets the same idea across.
there's some people saying this is what the video is saying and i think I'm just being misunderstood. the video seems to imply that tape is used as a primary mode of storage at CERN. this should be impossible. the read rate of tapes is simply too slow, even just to read the data for regular processing.
it's well quoted that when running the hadron collider at cern produces 1PB of data per second, which is a collosal amount. you could download every show on Netflix in every quality in 3 seconds at that rate. tape drives have a max throughput of about 750mb/s writing contiguous segments. you could stripe the data for extra throughput, however.
this means, that like Google who also use this technique (and likely Amazon, with glacier) most everyday data must be stored on a traditional storage array, with the tape for backup. this storage array is never mentioned in the video and I came away with the impression that CERN used tapes for primary storage. if this is the case, it's the only case i know of in tech and i would be extremely impressed . or horrified
He is correct. The video fails on making the fine but very important comment on that the tape DOESNT replace hdd's, but rather just back up old data
“This is exactly what they just said”, to address this argument, they presented some of the argument like this, although they were unclear at some points. For example, the expert tape guy said he didn’t know of any storage mediums which could beat tape, and he was cut off after that, and I would assume he would have clarified that he meant in terms of cold storage and archival purposes, rather than mainstream consumer products, such as the aforementioned laptops. The problem here is that they didn’t do the best of jobs clarifying that they meant specifically for archival storage, rather than storage meant to be used at anytime by your average person on their laptop. The difference between read/write speeds on just tape and a low end 5000 RPM HDD is gigantic, and the gap grows even further when you bring in SSDs. The video also never brought up the absolute snail’s pace at which tape reads and writes data, which isn’t a problem if it was entirely gauged towards a techy audience who already understood this fact, but the problem also arises that this video seemed to be gauged towards people who lived through the time of mainstream tape storage for consumer devices, and it doesn’t go into a whole lot of detail on the more technical aspects of why they use tape, how expensive it is to use regular hard disks over tape (considering 12TB consumer grade HDDs are a thing), and how it’s “safer” to store it on tape (this could just be referring to it being used as archival storage, but that’s a bit of a stretch considering they were comparing it to hard disk storage). They did, however, mention that Google used the tape as a backup storage, rather than a main storage medium for some of its services, so I do give them credit where it’s due.
All in all, the video could appear somewhat misleading to someone who didn’t pay attention to every word and isn’t very into tech stuff like storage mediums in Silicon Valley, and I think they could have done a better job clarifying this, as obviously not everyone even knew that some of these companies even still used tape for any storage whatsoever, but if you were really interested and maybe thought buying a tape drive or something like that for your next gaming computer would be a good idea, with even the most basic of searches you could easily find out how slow they are and that their main use is for archival data as they are so slow, but large and relatively inexpensive.
CERN: We are so smart, we have our data backed up with tapes to prevent hackers
Me: *brings magnet*
NASA wants to know your location
CERN also has some of the most powerful magnets in the world, wich is conCERNing.
IF you can even smuggle a magnet inside one of the most secured locations on the planet..
@@KayoMichiels well that place is literally a magnet place
They have super strong magnets that guide the beams,
Ironic
That guy can speak so low, damn
In the information age a patent dispute disrupts the next level technology.
This is like saying someone patented the bronze age and decided not to release it.
Wow! I never would have guessed that tapes were still being used for info storage.
Timothy Nickles 2 the VHS fan Can it go corrupt like a regular Hard drive or is it pretty much invincible?
They still are in many large offices everywhere for backup
@KolTony where are you going to find one of those during the work day? It has to be strong, not the little piddly magnet used in your phone case.
Me too
Irl magnetic tape could be used for space travel because it makes so much sense to use it because its resilient to radiation and such and lasts a long time
Tape never left. LTO tapes (as shown here) have been a core solution for on-prem data storage/recovery for two decades.
It's all about data density per surface area.
Only drawback is that tape does not do well in high heat and direct sunlight and I magnet can wipe the memory. Also data retrieving is slow. That is why they us tape as a back storage. Because it is still really sturdy as long as it is not exposed to heat, direct sunlight, or a magnet.
Rex it Stores so slow imagine the ram buffer that they have :0
@@lordnodob7338 they don't use it for ram anymore, it's purely archival now
Dropping a cartridge can be a big problem, too. I can’t tell you how many tape tickets I’ve solved by having the backup admin physically inspect the cartridge and the issue was a jammed leader pin.
If sunlight can ruin tapes, explain how audio cassettes still sound just fine, despite sitting on a car dashboard for months/years? (I 've never listened to a tape stored under such conditions, but tapes I bought at the swap meet and Goodwill still sound great despite showing signs of sun exposure (bubbled labels, fading, etc.)
@@mynamehasspacesinit8687 strange, I've had the opposite experience. Tapes left on the dashboard melted. I think Blockbuster also had a warning, to not leave the tape in the car.
I just love the way she says "tape!" and "tape!" again, just near the start.
I was work for FIlm Archive, so Linear Tape Open is basically my daily basis working material :)
Wow, I didn't expect tape technology to have advanced this far. I remember my old VHS tapes. They're all gone now since mold and fungus got into them.
Eeeek! Yes, there definitely needs to be cool, clean, moisture free conditions when storing magnetic tape.
What's cool is that even VHS tapes could be used for digital storage. There were devices in the late 90's that could make a VHS tape store around 4gb of data.
1gb per second? What kind of data they get? Universe mixtape?!
Jio Dhan Dhana Dhan 🤘😅
Uncompressed 4k video is about 1gb/s, it's not that special. Still some big ass files though.
When the two protons hit each othe r they disintegrate in a multitude of smaller particles
Around the point of impact are various sensors detecting the directions and the speed othese particles ro try and identify them
Also,they try to measure as much collisions as much can to have a statistical approach
Yes, they are recording the universe's mixtape
You should see how much the seacable's bandwidth.
I remember when I was at tech school and my teacher showed me a server blade that had a tape drive in it. I was really surprised when he told me tapes were used as backup and that they could hold up to 1TB. Years later, I work at a company which has on-premise servers and a friend of mine has to go to the data center from time to time carrying IBM tapes to make backups.
I love how much effort you guys put in these videos. Kudos for making high quality vids.
This isn't high quality at all.
@@arden-chan easy for you to say as an audience who didn't expend any energy creating it
I was literally doing work experience with IT infrastructure of a hedge fund company a couple weeks ago, and I was swapping out these exact same tape drives. Each one had 8tb in them, and apparentely these were the 'older generation' ones, whilst the newer ones can go up to 16tb or something ridiculous like that. Apparentely each drive is only £20, but you need a reader worth 10s of thousands and the data cant be as easily accessed in a hard drive, as the data needs to be read from the start of the tape, which takes up to 8 hours. They also are more susceptible to damage from dust if exposed, but other than that, they are more durable in pretty much every way to hard disks.
After watching steins gate, I can never look CERN the same way.
Fuji might make the most unreal comeback ever!!!!
backups and archives are stored on high-density magnetic tape that can store hundreds of terabytes of data at a time in a single cartridge.
Tapes as a storage medium will probably never die, what’s new is old again.
One of the first computers (univac) used tape to store and read data. The majority of mainframes in university in the late 70’s, early 80’s used tape to load data/programs into it. Most home computers in the 80’s (like the c64, zx-spectrum etc.) used tape to store and load games and software. And then vhs for the home-video market and audio cassettes happened (there was even a niche market for storing backups on vhs). Then from the 90’s onwards, companies like pixar used tape to store nightly backups of data.
Then fast forward to today where tech giants and cloud companies like google dump huge amounts of (our) data on tapes for long-term data storage. (And those tapes will last for a LONG time).
When humanity goes extinct, one of the “artifacts” that the aliens/future civs would probably find are warehouses full of tapes lol
But wouldn't accessing data on tape be more slower than if you were to do the same on an ssd or hdd because you'd have to unroll the whole thing first just like trying to find that song on a cassette tape?
It's fast enough, and technically we don't even use all the bandwidth of SATA 6Gb/s, so it's not big deal thou.
Magnetic Tape was never gone, it's being used in things where data access times isn't that vital. I remember reading in my book that it was also used to store data from large servers.
Making a comeback? It never went away! (for data)
Having tape means they are relatively vibration damage proof and (as long as you don't factor in the cost of the machine to read/write to them) relatively cheap, but they are susceptible to degradation over time and fire. As long as there are 2+ copies of each bit of data though, it would be almost impossible to loose any data in long term tape storage by accident.
All storage mediums are susceptible to fire, save for some forms of optical storage. And clay tablets, I guess.
quartz videos are so unique and unlike anything else on TH-cam. They truly seek out the most interesting and unlikely stories
Really interesting content. Thanks Alura.
1:50 "...the hard disks we all use to store stuff"
*Laughs in solid state*
I actually own one of CERN’s old data tapes. Seriously. You can get a used tape with Higg’s boson data on it (not that you’d be able to read it, and handling it a lot likely messes with it anyways) in their gift shop if you visit them in Geneva. I keep it on a shelf on my desk; it’s a fun conversation starter (particularly since I’m a university student in math with a background in physics).
I DID expect it to be tape....
It has much more phisical surface than hard drives.... One full-lenght piece can store 10TB of data...
I once even saw a 40TB one...
I expected it to be tape because the title of the video was "tape is here to rescue big data"
@@nolin132 I'm not talking about the video but about the topic itself... I knew it for like 2 years already
Terrific video and tremendously informative! I'm big into vinyl records, have been collecting since I was 12 and enjoying the warm sound since I got my first record player when my great aunt gave me hers and all her records when I was 14, and my other two aunts gave me all theirs as well. Motown, Beatles, Rolling Stones, Talking Heads, tons of 80's classics. I had some cassette tapes when I was younger, and I have a few now purely as a music collector. But I love old technology, and I've been really getting interested in magnetic tape. So much that I pulled my old VCR out of storage and plan to hook it up soon and watch some of my movies that I still have on VHS just for pure nostalgia. I also found a Technics tape recorder/player from I think the 70's while cleaning out the old family home. Haven't tried batteries in it yet, and I don't have the correct power adaptor to plug it into a wall outlet so I'm not sure if it works, but if it does I have some Zeppelin cassettes, and the cassingles for No Doubt 'Just a Girl', Biz Markie 'Just a Friend' and a few others I really wanna jam out too the way I would have originally growing up in the 90's.
Ah Talking Heads
Same as it ever was
Mark Lantz should audition for Batman. That way Hollywood won't need a speech synthesizer.
Good video !!!
Yes! Tape is back! Well, if you ask me, it's always been here, but yay on coming back on a large scale. :)
Oh thank God for this report. I've been telling people for years that analog forms of technology and data storage were still safer and more durable than digital forms. I've been vindicated. But the advances in the capacity of magnetic tape data storage was news to me.
This is not analog tape we're talking about here; it's digital.
@@MatthewStinar -- Thanks for the clarification; I misspoke. Of course, digital magnetic tape. That's the only way to get those capacities.
Imagine having some of sciences most important data on tapes, in the same facility with some of the worlds strongest magnets
I have a bit of a thing for adhesive tape so I understand how it can be sometimes ;)
This was so interesting .
in the 70's home computers weren't using a gig of tape. Also, tape never left.
Working at a company which also has a foot in the LTO business and it’s alive and well!
I can't believe how humans are returning to/sticking with all these mechanical elements in electronics. Tapes need tension levers and spinning wheels to operate, HDDs are essentially spinning CDs stuck together and now even some phone models have motors inside to slide out cameras, because god forbid a phone has a notch or an edge next to the screen.
Because they are more reliable to save backups
Pretty much excited with this 330 petabites of innovation 😍
No, the average laptop does not have 1 TB of storage, more like 500 GB
newer laptops do but it still varies
My ASUS has 1TB storage in 1 SSD. I plan to install another 1TB for data
@@jusufagung Yes but it's definitely not the average.... I have a MacBook pro with 258gb sooo....
I am planning on buying a new laptop and install an extra Nvme drive though
Tape archivinng has always been there and it's not "comming back". In fact, it's usage is decreasing, altough it will still be used for offline storage for decades, probably, because of how cheap and relatively secure it is.
I work with enterprise level backups, and tape isn’t making a comeback; it never left.
The laptop analogy is wrong tho... your laptop also has a battery, screen, CPU, RAM, motherboard etc.
The storage is only a tiny part of it...
This is good for storage or archival purposes, but I highly doubt that tape could have the same access speeds.
It's about 300MB/s so your access speed is largely negated once you get the data transferring.
next method cave painting.
Why not talk about Hot, Warm and Cold data to explain where tape fits into the whole data center storage segment?
For some reason, this makes me think of where the Death Star plans were stored on Scarif in _Rogue One_ 😏
Well, they were stored on a tape and retrieved by a tape robot...
cool wholesome tape researcher
i thought big data was some kind of conspiratory big company on data, not actaully just plain huge data lmao
I need that tape and a port in my laptop
You might say tape is on a roll.
That's a lot of data. Time to give Linus Tech Tips a call
Right? Put one of his monster arrays next to an LTO 8 tape and see who fills up first, lol.
Its gonna be wild when tape comes full circle in video games. As video and games increase in detail and the storage on a disc or hard drive is limited, tapes may one day return to the status of common household items.
I can't imagine how fast retrieval procedure using this tape, this is genius
Pretty quick, depending on how busy the library is.
YOU MISSED ONE THING CASSETTE TAPE THAT USES WITH COMMODORE AND ALSO BACKUO VHS DRIVES sorry for caps
A months ago I played 1986 human league tape it still works.
In the music industry, when they say “Master Tape, do they mean they’re recording final versions using archival tapes? If not, do they use a digital equivalent to store “Master Files” (Uncompressed) when they’re finalizing an album up for sale?
03:19 "the average laptop has a capacity of 1 terabyte..." I'm sorry, what?!
Yes it was the standard today
Some laptops have 1tb of storage but not the average
You must see the new Line up model from laptop makers even new entry model get 1 terabyte. The video is mentioning the latest tech in tape capacity and today laptop.
Yeah I agree 1TB is the standard for midrange(standard) laptops.
For anyone not using a Mac
This is unlike anything I'd seen ever!
The IBM guy looks exactly how you'd imagine an IBM guy would look.
Tape is good for archival usage.
The whole time they spend comparing it to hard disks when hardly anything uses a disk hard drive anymore, most now use SSDs
but ssd is expensive... they used just to store the data, so slow read and write not a big deal
Very untrue, in an enterprise setting anything nearline is stored on SAS HDDs
Yeo !!! never give up
Are there any downsides? I'm just curious.
They lose their data if placed in a magnetic field. Also direct sunlight corrupts data.
Degrades over time.
Isn't that the same problem as HD. I thought tape is more reliable. I used to be do tape backup for a company It took forever to backup, search n restore. Those are drawbacks
It is a lot slower to get data from compared to other storage methods like metal disc or ssd
@@Asteroid_Jam This is the main reason consumers don't use it, it is a lot slower then SSD with read/write speeds of 3500MB/s while tape is doing between 50MB/s for LTO6 and 300MB/s for LTO7 local
When I was 4, they told me: Flour, milk, eggs --- viola! Tape.
4:09 that is extremely misleading. In the 70s we used cassette tapes -- I can't remember the exact number, but it was like 150KB -- home computers didn't even play with 1gig of data.
We actually learned about this in grade 9 computer science
2:32 So... the Cloud is held together using duct tape? xD
Looks like CERN is/was using LTO 7 - If you look closely at the labels at 2:24 you can see the "L7" suffix.
Almost everyone was/is thanks to that patent war. Now it's over LTO8 migration can begin.
I know nothing about data and yet here I am.......
U r nothing but data for companies
Lmao that escalated 😂
time to load my game library on to a tape drive
When you realise the you tube video you're watching uses the same storage technology as vhs..
That is not true. More accessible data will not use tape because it will be too slow. However, archived data is stored on the tape.
Except vhs was stored as analog, whereas the data here is stored as binary.
I read several years ago an article that we reached at a point we can store 1byte in 96Atoms (12 atoms per bit) the storage capacity changed by the years but is it possible to use normal tapes but change the reader and writer or is this impossible?
What about read and write speed
The 1970s tape cartridge shown at 4:05 is all wrong. This is a Travan TR-1 cartridge released in 1995
Irl magnetic tape could be used for space travel because it makes so much sense to use it because its resilient to radiation and such and lasts a long time plus researchers at IBM have combined this technology with quantum technology to help make it even more resilient to hackers which is nuts even Militaries still us this tech
Were do i get one of these tapes for my pc? 10 terrabyte seems like fun
Tape never went out of popularity as it has always been the ideal method for archiving data for the same reasons they mention in the video
I'm more surprised that Fujifilm is still alive
they mostly make digital cameras, and those instax brand is doing really well
Tape drives supposedly break down in five years. The tape lasts 20 years. New tape drives are not backwards compatible more than two generations, what 3-4 years.
Edit: Sony and fuji are in the courts regarding the latest lto tapes
When the drives break down, you fix them...
Tape is suseptible to wear and tear. Every time you run it writing/reading it takes out of the life of the tape itself. Magnet, tempreture, humidity, dust, all affect it. Not to mentione its extremely flimsy.
Not something you want for "long term" storage
I want a 50 terabytes phone with tape roller storage inside it.!!!
If someone learns how to hack tape, would it be called a tape worm?
it silly how often experts go back and forth
on the best ever advice.
It's as if experts change their minds as new data comes up. As if they don't hold a dogmatic view on things. Weird!
50% of the comments “tape isn’t making a comeback ... it never left “
Not sure if that music was the best fit
We now have the technology to create the Ultra VHS (4K/8K VHS tapes)! Someone get JVC on the line!
Plus, LTO tape looks like it has the same width as a VHS tapes, so it's just a matter of placing LTO tapes into VHS shells.
So where can I get some consumer tape to back up my data
whenever i see the "Large Hadron Collider" i always mistakenly read it as "Large Hardon Collider"
Wew old tech is still useful
If there were 1GB tapes in production in the 1970s and '80s, why could VHS only store one movie or three episodes each?
Was it cost? Could data not be retrieved fast enough?
VHS stores analog data, it's a direct representation of the actual scanlines of the video. There was an lgr video with a VHS backup system for PC's, I think that also stored the digital data in an analog waveform.
turns out arnim zola in the mcu is quite updated
“Storing things on tape means it’s offline” What? That’s not true at all, if the machine connected to these tapes is connected to the internet so are the drives. With this reasoning you could say “Storing things on Hard Drives means it’s offline” as well.
I wonder if DNA based storage will be the thing that overtakes tape in terms of density and cost
lto tape never left
The dislikers are the ones who thought they could replace their HDs with duct tapes 😂
why are you using a laptop for storage comparison? I feel like taking the time to explain other forms of storage and how unreliable they are in the long term would've made so much sense
If you were to make a completely lossless copy of a vhs tape, it would take up gigabytes worth of data, despite the low visual quality.
*accidentally drops magnet on tape*
And so begs the big question. With our civilization collecting more and more data/knowledge and storing it no more and more advanced technology/system, what would happen if we suddenly lose those technology. What if a war start and we bombed ourselves to the dark-age, remnants of humanity will not automatically be able to use or decipher the tech we use today rather than say a book. All of this data and knowledge collecting will hypothetically be lost.