Magnetic tape has not completely disappeared and is still used in data centers today. Today I will tell you why this happened.
High capacity
This is one of the main advantages of magnetic tapes. When commercial hard drives with a volume of 1 GB appeared on store shelves in the mid-nineties, tape cartridges of the DDS-3 model already contained twelve times more information.
In our time, a similar situation has developed. Modern cartridges contain almost a kilometer of 12.6 millimeters wide tape. It can store up to 30 TB of compressed data. At the same time, the volume of hard drives for the enterprise segment has only recently approached the 16 TB mark.
Low storage cost
The cost of storing data on tape is significantly lower than any other drive. One gigabyte of hard disk space costs about $ 0.025. For tape, this figure is $ 0.008. There is a known case with one large genetic laboratory, when the transition to magnetic tape reduced the cost of storing data from $ 800 thousand to only $ 7 thousand.
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At the same time, large IT companies today continue to develop technologies that expand the capabilities of magnetic tapes. For example, in 2017, engineers at IBM introduced a recording method that would save 330 TB of uncompressed data in a palm-sized LTO cartridge.
Durability
It is known that errors on magnetic tape occur four to five orders of magnitude less often than errors in HDD. When stored properly, they can last for about 30 years. This is more than any other popular drive today - HDD or SSD. According to statistics from one of the largest cloud providers, the average life of hard drives rarely exceeds four years. As for solid-state drives, according to some sources, they will live about ten years, but only if the devices are used regularly.
IT companies are still developing technologies to extend the life of tape. Two years ago, IBM teamed up with Sony to introduce a film coated with an additional lubricating layer. It protects the tape surface from damage as it moves at a speed of ten meters per second while reading.
Technological progress
One of the main reasons for the "renaissance" of the magnetic tape is the fact that many of the shortcomings that it possessed in its early years have now been corrected. Previously, the drive meant only sequential access to data, so it took 50-60 seconds to search and read information. For comparison, for a hard drive, this figure is 5-10 milliseconds.
Modern technologies have neutralized the influence of this disadvantage. The new cartridges support the LTFS file system. It indexes the contents of the tape, which speeds up data reading and creates the illusion of random access to them.
Moreover, tape storage installed in data centers is automated. Large-scale robotic libraries can occupy an entire machine room. Special manipulators automatically search for the required cartridges and quickly load them into the readers.
Who uses magnetic tape
Companies that need to process (and archive) large amounts of data. First of all - IT giants and cloud providers. Tapes store backups and other infrequently accessed data. For example, in 2011, a bug in the system led to the deletion of emails from Gmail users. Then Google recovered data from magnetic tapes.
Research organizations such as CERN also use magnetic tapes. Every second the Large Hadron Collider generates one gigabyte of data. The total amount of information collected by the institute to this day exceeds 330 petabytes.
To store them, the organization uses the CASTOR system on magnetic tape, developed by CERN engineers. It is regularly updated and converted to more advanced cartridge types to increase capacity, reliability and speed. The organization gives out of service drives to investors as souvenirs.
Also, among the users of magnetic tape, one can single out IT companies that work in the field of Big Data and develop artificial intelligence systems. The drive is used to store data generated by IoT devices. For example, just one self-driving car can collect up to 30 TB of data per day.
Each year, the amount of data that humanity generates exponentially grows. The proliferation of IoT devices and artificial intelligence systems only aggravates this. The number of companies using magnetic tape solutions will grow with these markets. There are technologies like DNA storage, which in the future will replace magnetic tape at the post of "cold storage", but there is no need to talk about their practical implementation on a large scale.
Author: Dmitry Gachko
