The upfront cost of tape is excessive though. It wasn’t always like that. And LTO-9 missed its capacity target: it’s 18TB (1.5x LTO-8) instead of 24TB as planned. Who knows what will happen later in the roadmap.
Paper would fall under that these days, wouldn’t it? You can’t just fit a word (8 bytes) onto a punch card like the old days, and you’d need billions of the things go even start matching up to modern storage.
I did call out data density in my first comment. Did you somehow miss that? Not all things that need storing are megabytes in size, though.
Why would you assume that paper means punch cards? Printers can store far more than a machine word on a page, are relatively cheap, and are widely available. For some things, this can be superior to both magnetic and flash storage.
Tape presents its own share of problems. If not strored in some very particular conditions, like temp, humidity, and others that I can’t recall, they can stick to tbe adjacent layers, become brittle, curved, etc…
I think tape storage has the best longevity in offline data storage, but it’s been a while since I checked.
Yeah I believe tape is still king there. LTO is working on some 500+ TB tape for the future IIRC.
The upfront cost of tape is excessive though. It wasn’t always like that. And LTO-9 missed its capacity target: it’s 18TB (1.5x LTO-8) instead of 24TB as planned. Who knows what will happen later in the roadmap.
Strictly speaking, I think paper beats magnetic tape on longevity.
Unfortunately, it loses on data density.
If we are going by that metric clay tablets beat paper.
I was excluding media that are impractical for most people to use.
Paper would fall under that these days, wouldn’t it? You can’t just fit a word (8 bytes) onto a punch card like the old days, and you’d need billions of the things go even start matching up to modern storage.
I did call out data density in my first comment. Did you somehow miss that? Not all things that need storing are megabytes in size, though.
Why would you assume that paper means punch cards? Printers can store far more than a machine word on a page, are relatively cheap, and are widely available. For some things, this can be superior to both magnetic and flash storage.
Tape presents its own share of problems. If not strored in some very particular conditions, like temp, humidity, and others that I can’t recall, they can stick to tbe adjacent layers, become brittle, curved, etc…