Omnimaga
General Discussion => Technology and Development => Other => Topic started by: Keoni29 on May 05, 2014, 10:43:49 am
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Amazing new magnetic tapes from sony.
Tokyo, Japan, April 30, 2014 - Sony Corporation ("Sony") today announced that by independently developing a soft magnetic underlayer with a smooth interface using sputter deposition, it has succeeded in creating a nano-grained magnetic layer with fine magnetic particles and uniform crystalline orientation (...) makes it possible to record more than 185 TB (terabytes) of data per data cartridge.
Source: http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/News/Press/201404/14-044E/index.html
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That's quite a bit O.O
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I figure they would use this technology to store the data of all american citizens.
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Probably NSA and Google have already ordered a dozen.
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Holy, that is insane O.O
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finally :D
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Think about it. A harddisk has limited surface area because of its form factor. A tape can be really large because you can just roll it up on a reel. Reading and writing data is a lot slower though. It has sequential access instead of random access.
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They still do cartridges/cassettes? O.O I thought that was abandoned long ago due to risk of degradation over time, risks of the tape getting messed up/loose/stuck, plus people losing data due to storing their cartridges/floppy disks close to magnets.
I would hate to lose a 195 terabytes WabbitEmu animated screenshot from my latest Supersonic Ball run. :P
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They use magnetic tape in video equipment because you need a very large storage capacity. If it were all solid state or harddrives that would be very expensive. The sequential r/w nature is not a problem because that's the way the data is captured.
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On the plus side, this tech has really high seek speeds since the spindle motor relative to the tape is moving along more data. (Same area with more data on it.) This means that you should be able to read significantly faster than earlier tape drives. However, writing will still take the same style of magnetization, so it likely does not see any real improvement.
It's worth noting that the only real difference between tapes and drives from a functionality standpoint is that drives can move in two dimensions, whereas tapes move in only one. This means the drives can seek exponentially faster relative to size, but tapes can be infinitely large.
For data backups tape is the perfect medium. dd literally writes sequentially, byte by byte.
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Yeah, the smaller you can make a bit on the tape and the longer you can make said tape, you can store a ridiculously large amount of data on it. The only limit is the size, really.
Also tapes are more efficient as they can't really break like a hard drive would do. Hard drives don't really have a really long life before it inevitably breaks, tapes can gather dust for quite a few years and it will still work, that's why it's still very popular for backups.
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I got some games from the 80's on tape that still work. (not all of them still work though)