The mix tape is about to make a comeback, in a big way according to New Scientist. From the updates posted by Facebook’s (FB) 1 billion users to the medical images shared by healthcare organization worldwide and the rise of high-definition video streaming, the need to store massive amounts of data is greater than ever. Hard drives have been the workhorse of large storage operations for decades. However, a new wave of ultra-dense tape drives is set to the replace the HDD. The new tape drives pack in information at much higher densities, while using less energy in the size of a 1980’s mix tape, according to the article.
Researchers at Fuji Film (4901) and IBM (IBM) have already built prototypes that can store 35 terabytes of data. The cartridge which measures 10 centimeters by 10 cm by 2 cm, can store about 35 million books’ worth of information. This is achieved using magnetic tape coated with nanoparticles of barium ferrite. The coating stabilizes magnetic storage media by keeping moisture and oxidation (rust) from damaging the surface of storage tape.
But the real début for this technology, the author speculates will be with the Square Kilometre Array (SKA). The SKA will be the world’s largest radio telescope when it is completed in 2024. SKA will consist of thousands of antennas across the southern hemisphere. Once it’s up and running, the SKA is expected to pump out 1 petabyte (1 million gigabytes) of compressed data per day. If the SKA data archive was built using today’s 3-terabyte HDD’s, the telescope would fill an unmanageable 120,000 drives a year.
100 terabytes on a cartridge
That annual archive growth would swamp an experiment that is expected to last decades, says IBM Fellow Evangelos Eleftheriou, who is part of a team working to build tapes for the SKA. The IBMer says that by the time the telescope comes online, they expect to be able to store 100 terabytes. They plan to store that much data by shrinking the width of the recording tracks and using more accurate systems for positioning the read-write heads used to access them.
Using tapes should cut down drastically on energy use, too. A 2010 study by Clipper Group found that data centers with disc drive arrays use over 200 times more power than would a tape library of similar size. Disc drives in large arrays tend to stay powered-up, so their platters spin continuously, in case data is required, says Jon Hiles of Spectra Logic, a digital archiving firm in Boulder, CO. But tape drives only use power when they are being read or recorded on, he says.
The downside of tapes
The downside of tapes is that they are slower to access than hard discs. Tapes have to be fetched by a robotic mechanism, inserted in a reader and spooled to the right point. But the Linear Tape File System, expedites this process to make it comparable to disc drives, Eleftheriou told the blog. As storage needs skyrocket, hard drives won’t be able to keep up and keep power down, Eleftheriou says. Density improvements in hard drives are facing physical limits that mean they can only add more power-munching platters. “It’s time to take advantage of the low power and low-cost of tape,” he says.
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It is unlikely even the largest firm will need the kind of capacity SKA’s IT staff will have to deal with every day. But it is likely that every organization that stores big data on-site will be looking for low-cost, high-capacity alternatives to disk. However I would not want to trust 35 TB (or more) of data to a cassette which can be easily destroyed. Do you think the 80’s mix tape cassettes are the future of big data storage?
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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him at LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
