TOKYO – Fujifilm will raise production capacity for magnetic tape fivefold to meet artificial-intelligence-driven demand, marking the company’s large
Why tape? Tape sucks, for multiple reasons.
For the same reason people eat cats and dogs during famines. Scarcity makes everybody do shit they’d never do otherwise.
Fine. More Cold / long term storage options are good. Actually looking at LTO5 because of AI induced HDD increases, can just use my offline backup HDDs for a while instead of buying until this all blows over. Buut…
Can’t we just have another CD burning revolution? Newer glass or quartz optical discs with femtosecond lasers are good for 360TB for 100K years (claimed) in a similar footprint. See also M$ sitting on ‘Project Silica’ for most of a decade.
Just imagine what sneakernet would be like if you could fit a library of Congress (with images) in the palm of your hand burned on a USB peripheral. All it needs is will and mass manufacturing.
I’d love to have a tape drive too.
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✇ U+2707: TAPE DRIVE
I’ve had to do backups (and more annoyingly, recoveries) on DAT tapes for years. Trust me, you don’t want to know what it’s like.
I once planned to do use a miniDV and camera for it. Like this: MiniDV cassette tape & full channel record - YouTube.
Long term storage for masses of cold data seems like it would be useful for when it rarely needs to be retrieved - my mind goes to user data like location and search terms for later use by law enforcement (but I am paranoid and all out of tinfoil). What innocuous real world uses would this data in this format be used eternal but infrequent recall?
Backups. Tape is still the cheapest and most resilient option for long term storage. Considering how expensive hard drives are now, changing your backup strategy to use tape instead could save hundreds of millions vs buying the equivalent amount in hard drive storage. Add the AI cybersecurity threats, plus the likelihood of regional turmoil and data centers being targeted in warfare, and how valuable pre-AI data is, I imagine there’s a desire to replicate existing backups for redundancy, and keep more of it in air-gapped cold storage.
The point the comment is making is their only doing this because the data centers aren’t built to improve AI as they claim but to store invasive spying records on the populace
I imagine audit trails for legal purposes (both business operations, and LLM processes), storing the original data used for creating LLM training sets in case they need to go back and redo them differently, and the usual data backups.
Next up: magnetic core memory and delay line memory make a triumphant return.
Damn - I was looking forward to lugging around stacks of punch cards.
Say what you will, punch cards I have left from the 60’s are still readable (or rather, they would be if I built a reader for them). That’s more than can be said of any floppy disk, ZIP drive or CDROM of any denomination from even 20 years later.
And guess what: core memories that have been left unpowered for decades are still readable to this day too. The guys on the Curious Marc Youtube channel have demonstrated reading back old Apollo program cores and recovering the software that ran on them several times.
Old tech is old and clunky, but it’ll still be functional long after the AI crap gets media-obsoleted out of existence. That’s not to say I’m glad it’s coming back though - particularly when the comeback is prompted by tech-bro-induced scarcity.
Yeah, I definitely miss the days when things were built to last. And last. And…
No need for a device, they are technically human-readable.
