Why we all should return to loving magnetic tapes by Kyle DuPerrett
If you were born before the early 2000s, you are well familiar with the trials and triumphs of magnetic tape in all its glory. Many of us still have enough VHS tapes to open a small Blockbuster store in our basements. But why would we return to an outdated medium for storing our information? And does it stack up to other competitors like SSD, Cloud, and more. First of all, the modern magnetic tape barely resembles the small mountain of VHS and cassettes you probably have in your basement. Many don't realize it, but tape is the most stable medium for data storage. You can open a tape, VHS or cassette, and the data is stored the same way, just read differently. Your parents Van Halen tapes or Star Wars movies will function just as well as they did in the 70ś and 80ś. Data on magnetic tape is difficult to corrupt, and stores well, even in some relatively harsh environments ie(that gross, perpetually wet cardboard box in that dark corner). But why, in the era of streaming, do we care? Simple, tape, bizarrely, has lived on and evolved, and is still in use. Tech giants IBM and Sony have worked together, among others, to bring a whole new kind of Tape to the playing field. Where once a cassette could hold an album in the palm of your hand, we now can hold 330 Terabytes of information, safely, for a very, very long time. Inf fact, when companies want to have long lasting digital records, they turn to tape, and some of your information, even on the almighty digital cloud, is in fact backed up by again, magnetic tape. So yes, tape has evolved, but with CDś, how do they stack up? Tape lasts decades, while CDś last one to two, and does not scratch as easily since it is in a protective case. It also is far cheaper to produce, and can be repeatedly edited and reused. The two mediums should never have had to compete, tape is perfect for government and corporate storage, while the public wanted cheap, disposable discs, which until streaming, was perfect for us. Not to mention, magnetic tape is much friendlier to robotics and evolution. Spectra-Logic, a leader in tape tech, had built high-tech cases starting at 19 inches high, with robotic arms that companies can use to access data on demand, after long periods of rest.
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Compared to the cloud, which could crash or corrupt data, tape is far superior. At less than 1 cent per GB, and the fact it requires no backup generator to keep data safe, as you could unplug the storage center for years, plug it back in, and choose the casette you want. This also minimizes the environmental impact in terms of power and production According to a leader in tape development: ¨And a single robotic tape library can contain up to 278 petabytes of data. Storing that much data on compact discs would require more than 397 million of them, which if stacked would form a tower more than 476 kilometers high.¨ You can see obvious ecological impacts as replacing these hard disk copies every 20 years is a colossal waste of manpower and resources for companies and groups such as the library of congress.
So, would you trade in your piles of CDś, boxy old computer hard drives, and more for a sleek new cassette storage center? Maybe, but companies even as mighty as Amazon and Apple rely upon this medium to carry their most prides information throughout decades.
Questions:
Should we continue the development and usage of tapes, why/why not?
Barriers you see to yourself or others using tapes for information storage.
Things we should vs should not store on tapes.
Sources:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomcoughlin/2018/03/14/magnetic-tape-keeps-rolling-along/#4f4c52963185
https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a27602/330-tb-magnetic-tape/
https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/why-the-future-of-data-storage-is-still-magnetic-tape
I think magnetic strips sounds like a great idea because of the efficient storage space and it's long shelf life.
ReplyDeleteI think we should use tapes instead of CDs because cost, environmental reasons, and its much easier to put things on the tapes instead of CDs. Problems I would see is the tape getting tangled and loosing the tape. Also the plastic cracking too. I think we should store music, audio books, broad casts, ... on tapes but shouldn't put more important information on there like data.
ReplyDeleteSamantha Fuller
Although the benefits of tapes in terms of cost, ecological impacts etc is valid, I don´t think it satisfies convenience. We are all so accustomed to and are in need of controlling our entertainments in our fingertips. If the tape were used for storing important information such as medical records etc, this would be a efficient storage. However, for everyday people, a tape would probably provide more inconveniences. For example, going to the 167th song on a tape would take a long time and would require us to memorize the song with its number.
ReplyDelete