Comment by hedora | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hedora | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting that they fell off the exponential curve in 2018.

The conventional wisdom is that the tape industry continuously backports hard disk media innovations that are a few years old, so the end game is that there will be a period after HD innovation ends that allows end-game tape to create an insurmountable advantage over the end-game HDDs.

Put another way, if HDDs stop getting bigger this year, then they'll end up competing with tape drives that continue improving density at current trajectories until ~ 2028, and choosing between 2023 HDDs vs. 2028 tape for archival storage will be a no-brainer.

Having said that, the rapid drop off in tape unit shipments combined with the stagnation of total shipped capacity suggests conventional wisdom might be wrong.

I wonder if HDD density improvements have already stopped, so now we're seeing the endgame.

But the increased density comes with reduced IO, similar to HDD. Most of the "density innovation" of LTO-9 etc comes with either just a longer piece of tape, or increasing the number of read/write heads along the same distance of tape.

That's why, while YoY growth of tape is (checks blog...) 5%, that's lower that global HDD sales growth even this year. This is a marketing piece from the LTO consortium.

Lastly, HDDs do way way better in the DC, operationally. From a much wider environment/humidity envelope of operation, to IO scaling linerally across data corpus, to siteops management, to having more than literally 1 vendor, etc.. That's why there are only two hyperscalars left deploying new tape, and even there it's dwindling or being deprecated.

Now HDDs have their own problems, and their density scaling with hamr/mamr/smr hasn't gone great, but no one is really asking for less IO from devices given power cycling drives tends to reduce IO just as effectively as fewer tape drives, and for far less money.

“That's why there are only two hyperscalars left deploying new tape, and even there it's dwindling or being deprecated.” Do you have a source for that?

Source: me. Feel free to contact me if you have a specific question.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com