Sony Tape Smashes Storage Record

Does it come in 8-track?

Think about how many times we could have Steppenwolf's greatest hits recorded in 185 TB? (Last 8-track I owned).

Assuming a CD-DA standard bitrate of 44.1 kHz, 16-bit, stereo encoding, how many copies of Steppenwolf would fit on one of these tapes and how long would it take to play them all, assuming five seconds' deadtime between copies?

Back of my envelope suggests about 2E9 copies, with a total playing time of about 300,000 years.

[Warning! This was calculated with no visible supply of coffee.]

Assuming 5 sec between tracks, total time per 'Gold' album is 40:57.

Assuming 5 sec between albums, I'm getting 426, 844 copies per tape, total time 33.23 years to play them all.

What's that in kb/min?

44.1 kilosamples/sec * 2 bytes/sample * 2 channels (stereo) * 60 sec/min.

Ah! Now back in the office (after a couple of days away on a job), and I've found my envelope. I based the sums on an MP3 track on disk, and made loads of sweeping assumptions, but my glaring error was mistaking 3,732 KB for 3.732 KB, so the results are a factor of 10E3 out. Should've been total 2E6 copies, total play time 300 years (all very hand-waving calculations with "ish" after every number).

I blame the lack of coffee. Nothing to do with my age (honest).

Brave Sir,

Which compilation?

Gold: Their Great Hits (1971)

16 Greatest Hits (1973)

Other compilations released later, but not on 8-track.

-----

My last 8-track was: Robin Trower: Bridge of Sighs

First LP (licorice pizza :) was: Iron Butterfly: In a Gadda da Vida

Last LP was: Jethro Tull: Stormwatch

I had Gold on 8-track.

Can't find the album length for Gold. 16 Greatest Hits is 57:47.

I'm pretty sure it was the '71 Gold but that tape is long gone now. Sure wished I hadn't thrown it out when the tape player ingested about half its contents. I could probably get . . . . absolutely nothing for it on Ebay.

My son was helping me clean out the garage one saturday when he stumbled across an old 8-track tape - a stowaway that had somehow missed the bin.

"Dad? What's this?"

"Nevermind. Just throw it away."

"C'mon, what is it??"

"Evidence of my age."

I think my parents still have their Zenith 8-track in my dad's ham shack in the basement. Along with a small collection of tapes. Probably haven't been played in decades. Next time I'm up in New Hampshire, I should ask my dad about it. They have been in the process of downsizing for several years now for the inevitable move to an independent living/assisted living/nursing care/morturary facility. My dad jokes about finding a place that has all of these so they don't ever have to move again.

I dumpedrecycled my Akai 8-track recorder after a substance like chewing-gum propagated through my tape collection like a virus.

Finding header...wait...finding header...

...wait...

next track...

...finding header....wait...

185 TB's worth of waiting...now that's progress!

Heck, that's almost enough storage to archive that 'Bath Breaking Technique' thread and two dozen Shinies!

Kinda like putting a supercharger on a Model T Ford.

NOW you're talking!

No no the original motor......like this....

http://theoldmotor.com/?p=105120

...oops

One TB isn't very useful for backing up 3 TB HDs. Right now I use HD backups. If the HDs backups are taken out of service they also keep for a long time.

I have discovered DVDs often do not keep for even 10 years. I have some Sony DVDs that don't even last 5 years. CDs 'have bigger print' and last much longer. I have also discovered faster burn rates equate to faster ruin rates. All my 2x CDs read fine but I wonder if 53x CDs burned 15+ years ago would still be readable.

That's a 1 followed by an 8 and a 5...as in one-hundred-eighty-five Terabytes.

Thats a little over 60 3 TB HDD's.

That's useful.

Maybe I didn't understand the article…

The article stated, "Sony is also working on more consumer-friendly storage - in March it announced it was working with Panasonic on the Archival Disc, which will hold 1TB of data, the equivalent of 250 DVD films."

I suspect the 185 T tape is as real as the 50% efficient solar cell. It is the size of a large pinhead and I figure that is about the size of the high density tape. The 1 T is what you can buy in the near future not the 185 T. I see the 185 T as a true crowd pleaser if the cost isn't completely crazy.

Oh, yeah, that.

I thought you were talking about the tapes. I wondered why you started talking about optical disks.

So, yeah, I agree with you. Archive quality disks tend to be a bit pricier than standard Office Depot fare. I imagine that the price for a 1 TB archive quality DVD will follow suit.

I looked around a bit to determine the upper limit for current DVD burners, but cannot find a number. I will go out on a limb here and say that any new 1 TB DVD will require a new DVD burner as well...for a price.

EDIT: Found it...16 Exabytes. Wow.

Whether or not my or your DVD burner manufacturer allowed this enormous address space is yet to be seen.

Yes Blue Rays are 33G.

I suspect the the shelf life of a burned disk will be less that a DVD.

One drawback to ultra-high-density magnetic storage is its vulnerability to cosmic rays. As these tapes are targeted for long-term archival storage of corporate/government data, it would be prudent to store these in an underground vault. Big oil companies archive their data this way, data from seismic surveys, for example, which generate petabytes of data per survey - especially 3D oceanographic surveys. Just one of our survey boats generated a terabyte a day, and this was in the early 90s.

High-energy cosmic rays are commonplace - several have passed through you while you are reading this! CRs zipping through these tapes can scramble a lot of bits, so customers beware!

That make a good deal of sense.

This baby can hold a whopping 3.75 MB of data!

Vintage 1956...