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by justonepost 3204 days ago
Is 500 petabytes really that epic? 1500 tapes? I could probably stuff that in the back of my minivan.
5 comments

To fit 500 petabytes on 1500 tapes, you'd need to put 333TB on a tape. Do any currently available tape formats support that much data on a single tape?

Granted, I stopped paying attention to tape drive capacities a while ago, but the upcoming LTO-8 standard will "only" support 13TB/tape, so you'd need 38,000 of them to hold 500 PB.

I've seen some higher density announcements in the 200 - 300TB/tape range, but couldn't find any products available.

AWS does offer a "Snowmobile" [1] product, that can hold 100PB on disks in a tractor trailer.

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-snowmobile-move-exabyte...

"I have a few qualms with building storage data centers. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by putting 1500 tapes into the back of your minivan and then mounting them locally via curlminivantapefs."
Great comment for 2017. I would like to see the 1987 version and the 2037 version of it.
I recently misplaced one of my 32GB SD Micro cards I was using to have an alternate image for my Raspberry Pi. So I just bought another one for the price of a half-decent lunch.

And I did have a flashback to my first hard drive, all 220 glorious megabytes of it, and a great deal more expensive than "a decent lunch", and get a sweet hit of that yeah... I am in the future, aren't I? feeling.

What will you tell your customers, exactly, while you go on a road trip with their data? And what happened to the data between the time you load Tape 0001 and Tape 1500?

Moving 500PB on a live application is not a trivial task.

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. –Andrew Tanenbaum, 1981