We all know that 'tape' is ... 'antique' technology now! Not all storage applications use solid-state drives (SSDs) or hard drives Drive (HDD) memory?
The answer is not exactly right, with a recent article in The Wall Street Journal, "Companies Look to an Old Technology to Protect Against New Threats." Mentioned that many companies in order to prevent the case, once again the data stored on tape.This is not just an anecdote: the market there are some strong data corroborating tape unit shipments increase, as well as more and more Much data is stored on tape.
Although not as easily accessible as an SSD or HDD storage, this property is one of its advantages, especially when it comes to 'worst case' where it exhibits its robust and slow recovery mechanism. , Hackers are less likely to be accessible because tapes can not be "wired." The Wall Street Journal article states that "tapes are still being digitized by governments, financial services companies, health insurers, and other regulated industries Recorded backup system Now, there are some companies began to look back for tape technology, as hackers in the infiltration of its preventive measures have become more and more powerful.
If you were still stuck on the old idea that tape was the big roll of disk, that was really out of date; in fact, there are only a few files left in the box and luckily enough to find the playback device. At the moment, the tape industry is now easy to use On a tape cassette so that it can be played back and rewound via a robotic arm in a larger array configuration of the tape drive 'field', as shown in the table. Even at the Tape Storage Council's Assisted, there are also a few standards that are in place to define the form factor and formatting, etc. The Tape Storage Council is an industry group formed in 2012 to promote technological innovation and application in the tape storage industry.
Two key criteria: LTFS and LTO
The two key criteria for tape technology are the Linear Tape File System (LTFS) - which allows tapes to be used almost as if they were HDDs and the Linear Tape Open (LTO) standard developed in the late 1990's for As an alternative open standard to proprietary tape formats at the time. The latest advances in tape technology are briefly described in the recent Tape Storage Council's "Technology Advances Propel Tape to New Markets" report application.
Tape versus SDD or HDD is not just about security; the Tape Storage Council is also concerned with reliability and bit error rate (BER), as shown in the figure below, the Quantum LTO-7 has an error every 1019 bits, Of HDDs average 1016 bits of error, the difference between up to three orders of magnitude is impressive, and other performance comparisons between tapes and HDDs are worth noting, perhaps even breaking the traditional myths.
The tape system is also a miniature analog signal, a wireless transmission link, even if the stored data is digital, and in many ways resembles an RF channel, except RF is replaced by a magnetic field for energy transfer. There are jitter, signal to noise ratio (SNR), intersymbol interference, signal strength changes affect all RF 'wireless' links.
Of course, the read channel starts with an analog preamplifier (mounted as close as possible to the readhead itself) and a variable gain amplifier (VGA), but that's just the beginning of analog signal processing because advanced tape systems use partial responses , And maximum likelihood (PRML) signal detection circuits to maximize the chances of achieving successful and zero-error data reduction (despite channel irregularities) .Although the physical dimension may be much smaller than the RF link, the signal path The blocks are similar.
There seems to be something that runs counter to 'going back to the future.' Tape is not only the first high-density data storage mechanism (much earlier than HDDs), but also an early 'amateur' - a personal computer (PC) Uses Philips Consumer Audio Cassettes as low-cost storage media (of course low and low capacity, of course), loads operating systems with boot loader and stores programs and data, and now, for amateurs Tape and tape are not cost effective today for hobby and business applications, especially high-density HDDs are more affordable and have random access, but underlying tape technology remains crucial - and there's even a comeback development trend.
As always, I would like to reiterate once again: As long as technology is concerned, it will never say impossible to seemingly outdated technologies. "One day it will not be possible to reproduce rivers and lakes until one day, More usable or more attractive, a good way to solve new problems.
Have you used advanced LTO / LTFS tape technology? Or have you used tape storage before?
Compile: Susan Hong