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Comment by thomastjeffery | Hacker News Reader

> CeraMemory cartridges (2025-30) storing between 10 PB and 100 PB, and its CeraTape (2030-35) with up to 1 EB capacity per tape.

> Cerabyte says its technology can read and write data at GB/s class speeds.

1EB = 1,000 PB = 1,000,000 TB = 1,000,000,000 GB

To read the 10PB cartridge at:

1GB/sec = 115.740.. days

10GB/sec = 277.7.. hours

100GB/sec = 27.7.. hours

To read the 1EB tape at:

1GB/sec = 31.7 years

10GB/sec = 3.17 years

100GB/sec = 115.7 days

1TB/sec = 11.57 days

10TB/sec = 1.2 days

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Throughput is usually a workable problem. Throw in a bunch of these devices and stripe your writes across them - now when you read, you get nice improvements in throughput. Look at ZFS VDEVs for example.

If they are inexpensive, and durable to be considered archival quality, it will find its place.. somewhere between NVME drives and the magnetic tapes.

So let's think this through: you have 10 1EB tape drivers in a RAID0. Each drive has a max throughput of 100GB/sec, so the array has a max throughput of 1TB/sec. Congratulations, now you can write 1EB of data to your array in 1.2 days!

But what about the other 9 Exabytes? Yeah, it will still take another 114.5 days to even touch that; and that's assuming "GB/s class speeds" means 100GB/s, and not less.

You may as well just get 10 100PB disks. There is no point getting extra storage that you will never have time to write to.

True if full 'tape' is read sequentially.

These kind of storage are indexed, one can jump directly to relevant sections and access the data.

Large storage density usually helps in efficiency of mounting & dismounting of media.

In other words: you don't have to wait for slow read times if you don't bother reading the data at all!

You still need to live with the slow write times, though. What's the point of even building a single unit of tape storage if it will take you a minimum of 30 years to write your data to it? Why not just make 1 million smaller ones?

You’ve now repeated this “30 years to write” thing in several places. It’s frankly obvious that the 1EB tape would have faster write speeds than that, and repeatedly pretending otherwise doesn’t make a compelling discussion. Taking decades to read or write a single storage device would make that storage device completely worthless for obvious reasons.

CeraTape is further into the future compared to CeraMemory, so it’s completely understandable that they wouldn’t be ready to talk about the read/write performance of CeraTape yet.

However, it is fun to imagine an audit logging server that is able to operate for 30 years continuously without having to swap the storage. Just write, write, write. The odds of an audit log ever needing to be read are usually quite low, but if it is ever called upon, you’d be able to quickly jump to the point in time of interest and recover the relevant audit logs from potentially decades of logs.

> It’s frankly obvious that the 1EB tape would have faster write speeds than that, and pretending otherwise doesn’t make a compelling discussion.

OK, so I should assume the max of "GB/s speeds"? 999GB/sec would still take 11-12 days!

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Even if we do limit to 1GB/sec, that's a lot of data to be logging, even if it's raw video. It would be neat to have that as a sort of infinite throwaway chache, though, but I can't imagine really using more than a petabyte or two.

12 days would be adequate. This is archival storage, not high performance storage.

However, I will emphasize again that CeraTape is further in the future, so it makes sense that Cerabyte would not be ready to discuss performance figures for that. What you’re continuously quoting is certainly referring to CeraMemory, the stuff they’re planning to release sooner in smaller capacities.

10PB at 10GB/s would be about 12 days. Even if it were 5GB/s, it would still be less than a month. A major trade off, to be sure, but I can definitely imagine applications where that would be acceptable if the cost were low and the durability were high.

The real question is whether they can deliver what they’re promising at a reasonable price.

The ultimate way to conceal data, just remember which index has your information, the rest is randomness.

Just hope someone doesn't have a good magnifying glass (I don't know if it's true of this, but many storage mediums leave a physical pattern that you can see, and randomness sticks out)

Encrypted data by any decent alt will be statistically indistinguishable from random noise.

Even without encryption, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erasure_code is common in archiving, and that tends to look pretty random. Obvious patterns don’t maximize the smallest differences between any possible messages.

Looks true

> Data reading can be done with equipment using high-resolution microscopic imaging techniques or electron beam microscopy

Can I have a tiny fraction of it? I want a consumer tape drive, or the revival of Zip disk /MO Disk that is in TB rage that last a few hundred years.

Just curious, but Wouldn’t you call a NMVE enclosure with TB3 or 4 a sufficient ZIP drive reencarnation?

We are looking at $149 for 4TB SSD. That is close to affordable. The only problem is current NAND price are abnormal and I dont expect this price to last. So that is the first problem, price / GB isn't quite there yet.

2nd being NAND quality varies a lot and are not battle tested as long term storage solution. Would I still need to have ZFS Storage for my SSD just in case? If so why not use HDD instead?

May be NAND will get there. But judging from the industry roadmap I have seen it wont happen for another 5 - 6 years.

No. Flash memory loses its data after just a few years unless regularly scrubbed an re-written (which in turn burns through your write cycles).

My reading of the abstract was that the “initial 10 PB systems” would be racks. You can build or buy a 10PB rack today, based on conventional HDDs. So these ceramic cartridges would have similar density to existing HDDs, and presumably stuffing a lot of them into a rack brings the opportunity for some I/O parallelism.

The extraordinary claim here is that the technology can scale by 10x over 5 years, and then also be applied to tape, all while being much cheaper. And you know what they say about extraordinary claims…

Even at 1MB/s it would be amazing (If it ever made it to consumer level stuff) you could just have it auto-archive anything on a cache disk that hadn't been touched in a year in the background.

PCI-E might approach that 1TB/sec number by the time CeraMemory ships. And 10ish days isn’t unreasonably long for model training (a bit long for first epoch though).

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/pcie-70-to-reach-512-gbs-a...

Might be good enough for archival storage, though.

An archive that takes 30 years to write... What would you write it from?

Any constant stream of data, from seismographs and radio telescopes to surveillance cameras.

You have 1GB/sec of that in one place?

Would be useful if you wanted to archive many tv stations at once (and never actually go back to watch them)

Or maybe go back to them in a rare case, like a criminal case investigation.

That's what I was thinking. Like the BBC archives. Who really cares if it takes 6 months to unarchive an entire decade of TV history?

CHIME telescope has a raw data rate of 1PB/day[1], or roughly 11GB/s. They use three levels of on-site processing since they can't store that much data.

The LHC had a data rate of over 40TB/s and even after the low-level triggers of over 100GB/s back in 2016[2]. Again they're forced to throw away most of it due to lack of storage.

This means someone looking for a novel signal can't just scan through the archives. I'm sure science instrument groups like the ones mentioned would have loved to be able to store more data.

[1]: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/aad188

[2]: https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev-nucl-...

radio telescope arrays can probably pull that much.

Same argument applies when I hear people say “we can just do an ETL job.” And why storage is so cheap in the cloud. Once you get a lot, it’s hard and expensive to move. And definitely why things like AWS Snowmobile exist.

If it’s that durable they can do raid 0 on it with 50 tapes. Can it?

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