Summary
One of the interesting things about the slow-moving AI apocalypse we seem to be trapped in is watching the knock-on effects reverberate through communities and economies. We’ve seen how — and lamented that — the LLM-driven datacenter build up has increased demand for GPUs, RAM and SSDs directly, and we watched that in turn increase demand for traditional, spinning rust hard drives. Perhaps it was only a matter of time before demand came for the tapes, too. Yes, tapes: good old fashioned “sticky tape and rust”. With AI increasing demand for archival material, Fujifilm has announced they’ll be increasing production by 5x through 2028. This production increase is specifically targeting about the latest and greatest 10th generation of Linear Tape, Open (LTO) which Fujifilm has produced since its inception. Indeed, Fujifilm has been in the tape storage business for almost as long as we’ve been storing data on magnetic tape, with their first forays into the field dating to the 1950s. The Ultrium10 tapes are available in 30 TB and 40 TB standard sizes, which are advertised as 75 TB and 100 TB based on a perhaps-optimistic 1.5:1 compression ratio. Given it’s already a linear standard and not exactly blazing fast at 400 uncompressed MB/s, there’s no reason not to compress the heck out of data being sent to cold-storage on tape. While not great by modern SSD or HDD standards, those are dizzying numbers if the last tape drive you used was a Datasette. Still, it shows that the industry is reacting to the same trends that have hackers bringing surplus tape drives into their homelabs. This isn’t a small bet by Fujifilm, with 10 billion yen (about $63 million) at stake. While some of us have been making more use of optical media these days, it looks like Sony isn’t reversing course on getting out of the Blu-ray business, so don’t expect to see giant disk changers coming to a server room near you. Tape bots are apparently a different story. Header image: Fujifilm. Maybe Fuji should restart those chinese factories making Fuji DR-II audio cassettes, while at it. Toshiba, get ready to resume making analog boomboxes (Akai already did, though, unsure if those are true Akai, but good enough, sell reasonably well) : ] Who knows. Physical media deserves its come-back. I feel like it’s standard to backup multiple copies across tapes. Also I’m not sure the built in compression that it does would be resistant to that issue either. LTO-10 goes a very long way to protect the data with error correction, data spreading over the tape and read after write. The bit error rate is better than 1 error per 10¹⁹ bits transferred or around 1 error per 100 exabytes transferred. Not error free, obviously, but really, really good. And by organising data in blocks, the effect of any errors can be minimised. Er, 100TB compressed down to 40TB, is that not a compression ratio of 2.5:1 instead of 1.5:1? Now if only they could get the price down to something reasonable for consumers. I’d love if it was cheap to backup everything to a few tapes that I could store in a few places for resiliency. Last, I checked it’s still incredibly expensive unless you get something absolutely ancient. Big too. Maybe now would be the right time to try cheap optical tape archive again? On the roll, not those silly squares trying to compete with thumbdrives like last time.