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  • nandnandnand - Tuesday, June 30, 2020 - link

    Nice to see raw capacity being quoted and not compressed.

    We could use a better form of storage technology for >100 TB. Probably optical-based, hopefully rewritable. Tape, HDD, and NAND all have annoying downsides. Yes, even some consumers/home users could use a 100 TB or larger drive.
  • Simen1-Norge - Tuesday, June 30, 2020 - link

    At 224 Gbit/inch the bits are as small as 54 nm. Optical based technologies must have a wavelength of that order to get those densities. 54 nm is extreme UV light that would etch away most materials, not to mention how hard it would be to focus that light. You simply cant have a UV immersion lithography medium for storage. A reader would cost millions and be as large as a car. The optical storage futurism scifi had its last moments with the remake of the Tron movie.

    Sorry for destroying a good scifi fantasy with boring reality.
  • Zizy - Tuesday, June 30, 2020 - link

    True, optical storage is not viable in 2D. But it is still a viable 3D contender. There is just a tiny little problem of making it :D
  • Simen1-Norge - Tuesday, June 30, 2020 - link

    Tape already are 3D. Think of it as a 3D cylinder, where you roll off thin 2D sheets to another 3D cylinder. The 2D tape layers are stacked at an incredable 5,6 micron thickness. Each LTO cartridge containing a total of over 24 square meters of 2D tape surface. Optical media are not even close in density or effective storage surface area
  • Kamen Rider Blade - Wednesday, July 1, 2020 - link

    Optical still has better random access performance =D
  • Guspaz - Tuesday, June 30, 2020 - link

    It is, though. Sony ODA (Optical Disc Archive) cartridges hold 5.5TB per cartridge with gen 3. Each cartridge holds eleven discs of 500GB each. They started out using Bluray for the first few revisions, which tops out at 200GB per disc with a double-sided triple-layer rewritable BDXL. They then moved on to Archival Disc, which initially held 300GB per double-sided triple-layer disc, and currently holds 500GB per double-sided triple layer disc. The next generation of disc will hold 1TB per double-sided triple-layer disc, getting them 11TB per ODA cartridge. They're still using the same basic structure/laser/etc from bluray.

    Density is lower than tape, but there are other advantages, such as longevity. You'll never see an ODA or an Archival Disc in the consumer market.
  • Kamen Rider Blade - Wednesday, July 1, 2020 - link

    I still think it's complete BS that their "Archival Discs" are only limited to 3x layers when in BluRay, they got all the way to 4x layers. They should be able to get to 4x layers with "Archival Disc" density. They already "Double-Side" the bloody thing, why not get 4x layers on both sides.
  • LiKenun - Thursday, July 2, 2020 - link

    The price is not too bad for Sony’s Optical Disc Archive. There are some outlets where consumers can pick them up like B&H.

    I do wonder how they plan to expand the capacity further though. The cartridges use the UDF file system which has been fixed to 2 KiB sectors. The standard uses 32-bit integers to address sectors, giving just under 8 TiB of addressable capacity. If the capacity doubles again, they’d have to update the standard to allow for 4 KiB sectors (probably backwards compatible with some UDF implementations), bring in 64-bit sector addressing (definitely incompatible), or design a whole new file system from scratch.
  • Kamen Rider Blade - Sunday, July 5, 2020 - link

    The ODA drive units are Multi $1,000 units. That's not "Affordable" to the average consumer in any way shape or form.
  • Simen1-Norge - Tuesday, June 30, 2020 - link

    That said, I would love to have much cheaper LTO-6-8 writers. LTO-6 media (2,5 TB raw) cost less then 25 USD.
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  • nandnandnand - Tuesday, June 30, 2020 - link

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_data_sto...
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5D_optical_data_stor...
    https://www.5dmemorycrystal.com/technology/

    I am using "optical" in the broadest sense possible, since we don't know what specific technology would win out for portable data storage. But it is clear that there are "optical" options in the >100 TB range.
  • Simen1-Norge - Tuesday, June 30, 2020 - link

    I believe quad layer BD-RE XL already are pushing the boundaries of optical media. Those are 10 USD/0.1TB. LTO are 25 USD/2.5TB. An order of magnitude difference.
  • Guspaz - Tuesday, June 30, 2020 - link

    BD-RE XL is triple layer, it's BD-R XL that is quad-layer. A double-sided BD-RE XL gets you 200GB per disc, but it's already been pushed further. Archival Disc uses the same laser and structure as BD-RE XL (triple layer per side) and holds 500GB per disc with the current generation and 1TB per disc with the next generation. They're still deciding where to go after that, as I believe that they see 1TB per disc as the limit without bigger changes.
  • Kamen Rider Blade - Wednesday, July 1, 2020 - link

    They can go "Quad Layer" like they did with Blu-Ray, but use "Archival Disc" density.

    But they can also have a extra data layer near the center of the disc structure like HD-DVD did, but using the "Archival Disc" laser density or Blu-Ray laser.

    Whichever, it should be within the realm of possibility of 4 layers in the center and 4 layers near the surface, then mirror that sucker onto both sides for 16 layers in total.
  • LiKenun - Thursday, July 2, 2020 - link

    I had read a decade ago that either Sony or Panasonic discovered a way to get about a dozen layers on a disc. I’m guessing that didn’t turn out to scale very well and so 4 layers was the best that they were able to manage for an economical product.
  • Kamen Rider Blade - Sunday, July 5, 2020 - link

    I think it has to do with signal to noise ratio, I've been delving into the technical side as to why they have some limit, when it comes to reading that many layers. The problem isn't fitting in more layers, the issue is reading the data back and getting noise from all the intermediate layers which makes it harder and harder to read back data accurately. That's probably why there are huge irregular gaps in between the Blu-Ray layers. If you read the White Paper / Technical Spec, the Blu-Ray layers all have different thickness gaps specified to help with Signal to Noise Ratio. The same could probably be true of stacking 10/20+ layers.
  • shabby - Tuesday, June 30, 2020 - link

    Maybe change the topic to "storage tapes" so people don't click on it thinking they'll see hard drives that big anytime soon.
  • MenhirMike - Tuesday, June 30, 2020 - link

    I love how LTO keeps evolving - also, because that means that older generations become affordable for home/prosumer use. LTO-4 and LTO-5 drives are pretty cheap (Note: LTO-5 native capacity is 1.5 TB, not 1.6 TB).
  • ThereSheGoes - Tuesday, June 30, 2020 - link

    Clickbait title.
  • s.yu - Tuesday, June 30, 2020 - link

    No if you look at that table then it genuinely means that tape could replace HDDs. They're mere 200g each, are smaller than 3.5" HDDs, and already have respectable write speed, which would match current SSDs in a couple years...though I guess the main issue would be a lack of rated r/w cycles? Random r/w would probably be slow too, but still it could replace HDDs in certain consumer applications.
  • MenhirMike - Tuesday, June 30, 2020 - link

    Random R/W isn't just slow, it's orders and orders of magnitude slower. Tape marks make it somewhat fast to seek to a specific file on the tape, but then finding a specific position within a file will kill performance. Seek times are completely unusable as a hard drive replacement for anything but backups.
  • MenhirMike - Tuesday, June 30, 2020 - link

    (A 5400rpm Laptop drive will absolutely murder LTO-8 in performance. LTO is awesome because of the price and longevity of the tapes, not because of anything performance related.)
  • MrVibrato - Wednesday, July 1, 2020 - link

    True, generally tape is no replacment for HDD due to abysmal seek times. However, as s.yu said, for certain consumer applications that might not be so relevant.

    With regard to home users, the perhaps last/strongest holdouts for HDDs are data hoarding and media libraries. While most probably use streaming for their media consumption, perhaps there could be a resurgence of tape-based digital video for those who really like to keep everything local "on premises". Not that i really expect it to happen, but it would be kinda funny...
  • mode_13h - Saturday, July 4, 2020 - link

    > for certain consumer applications that might not be so relevant.

    Um... besides backups, exactly which?
  • MrVibrato - Monday, July 6, 2020 - link

    I mentioned two examples, none of them were backup... o.O?
  • mode_13h - Saturday, July 4, 2020 - link

    Yeah, it should have replaced "drives" with "tapes".
  • Dogbertus - Wednesday, July 1, 2020 - link

    Hate to quibble about grammar on Anandtech, but this particular quibble is one that I have faced as a technical writer. Is it necessary to invent "areal" density when the unit of storage (gigabits per sq. inch) is quite unambiguous? Specifying linear density is useful when referring to video tracks on tape since the length of a video track is more than the length of tape on which it is recorded, but "density" alone suffices for hard disks if a unit, say, Gb/mm was mentioned. Would my grammatic quibble change for overlapping, shingled tracks or those made by HAMR heads? I'm not sure and would be gratedul for pointers. Thanks. And apologies for the digression.
  • cjl - Monday, July 6, 2020 - link

    Areal density is pretty commonly talked about in HDD manufacturing too, to differentiate from linear density (along a track), track density, or storage server density (TB/drive or TB/U). It's been used for a long time, and is far from a new invention.
  • mode_13h - Saturday, July 4, 2020 - link

    I wonder if anyone ever uses these sorts of tapes in a RAID 5 set. Not only would you get faster read/write speeds, but you'd also be protected from one of the tapes getting physically damaged.
  • shadowjk - Sunday, July 5, 2020 - link

    I imagine they're very much treated like write-once and (hopefully) read-never kind of storage.
    I wouldn't be surprised if there was a hdd or SSD to which the file was first prepared before copy to tape. And that's the stage at which I would add redundancy.
  • s.yu - Wednesday, July 8, 2020 - link

    A RAID5 of LTO-10 definitely sounds far superior(in basically every metric except R/W and write cycles) to RAID 5 of HDDs with matching capacity(which would still constitute a small server in 2022) if used specifically for media archiving.

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