Magnetic tape isn’t obsolete at all. Apparently these days they’re up to LTO-10, which can store 40TB per tape, and it’s also the cheapest storage medium per unit capacity (albeit with an extremely high initial cost for the drive itself). The only reason people forget about it is because it isn’t popular for home use.
Magnetic tape isn’t obsolete at all. Apparently these days they’re up to LTO-10, which can store 40TB per tape, and it’s also the cheapest storage medium per unit capacity (albeit with an extremely high initial cost for the drive itself). The only reason people forget about it is because it isn’t popular for home use.
just a couple days ago fuji announced they were investing a lot more into tape:
https://www.techspot.com/news/114394-fujifilm-pours-64-million-magnetic-tape-production-ai.html
Shouldn’t data centers be doing reels of data tape then instead of taking all our forms of removable media?
Wouldn’t that make a lot more sense? 40tb reels sound a lot more effective than a 4tb HD. Probably a lot less heat too.
Well, they can only be read linearly so they suck for random-access storage. But they are used in data centers, for backups.