At Age 60, Reports of Tape Death May Have Been Premature
By Dennis Kuba
April 2, 2012
April 2, 2012
- In spite of larger and faster hard drives, digital tape has not gone away. In fact, next generation tape drives are capable of 525MB/sec and a price of $25/terabyte, which is less than one quarter the cost of a hard drive.
- The Ultrium Linear Tape Open specification will ultimately have 32TB cartridges and 1.2GB/sec throughput.
- LT0-5, which currently supports up to 3GB compressed data, and the Linear Tape File System (LTFS) together allow tape to handle demanding new applications, such as cloud storage, Big Data and streaming media. LTFS allows partitioning of the tape so one can quickly find the tape’s contents on partition 0 and locate the data on partition 1. This allows one to keep data in a near-line environment.
- Tapes are increasingly being used by media companies to efficiently store master quality video. Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, National Geographic, The New York Times and the NCAA are using Thought Equity, a cloud-based storage service whose system uses an LTO-5 tape library with LTFS to handle more than 10 petabytes of data.
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