HN Reader

The bit on tape tension was really interesting!

Turns out that modern drives can stretch the tape to make tracks line up right. It makes sense that as density grows, the real world effects of things like temperature and humidity require more and more work to compensate for.

My company moved EiBs of data off of tape a few years ago. It was reliable and durable, but the problem was read speed.

It took so long to move tapes around and read the sequentially (no random access!), and as the data corpus grew it got harder to have a practical backup, even though the data was still theoretically extant.

I won't consider my business a success until we own and operate a tape library.

Most of the people who parrot the "tape is dead" stuff haven't used tape.

When it comes to the reliability of putting something on a shelf, then pulling it off twenty years later, tape still is better than everything else.

Given the gains in tape and hard disk densities in recent years, why can't we revisit floppy disks as a potential long-term archival media for the future? Are they particularly volatile? Would the design of the physical disk case be able to solve for such issues?

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Microsoft's research towards "replacing" tape storage in the future. Have a look at Project Silica.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-sil...