US storage huge Western Electronic now covers SSD, memory cards, RAM and really hard disk drives and has dipped its toes in DNA facts storage (it is a founding member of the DNA Information Storage Alliance).
Now, freshly-unearthed patents look to display that the organization might want to (re) include tape to finish its latest media portfolio right after the solar-location of its Arkeia item array a couple yrs ago.
The firm was a short while ago assigned a selection of patents mentioning “tape embedded drive” in current several years:
- 11393498 (PDF) (head assembly with suspension method for a tape embedded travel)
- 20200258544 (PDF) (Tape embedded drive)
- 11081132 (PDF) Tape embedded drive with HDD parts
- And a couple of more
What this alludes to is the intriguing chance of receiving the simple factors of a tape travel merged with the real tape media in a bid to lessen the inherent environmental and technological complexity of tape libraries as perfectly as increasing the entry time by at minimum just one buy of magnitude.
Possessing the go through and produce heads nearer to the media in an enclosed form element is almost nothing new. That’s what difficult disk drives do and what many others, most notably Iomega with its Zip Travel, has attempted to do in the earlier. Western Digital’s patent indicates adopting a standardized kind variable, 2.5-inch or 3.5-inch, for less complicated adoption by facts facilities and hyperscalers.
The expense issue
An embedded tape would nonetheless be additional high priced than a usual a person (LTO-9 tapes retail for about $130 a pop) because of the further electronics but you really do not require a tape travel to get began. As very long as it sits someplace between tapes ($4 per TB) and company tough drives ($20 for every TB), there will be a considerable market for it.
A common LTO (Linear Tape-Open) tape is 102 x 105 x 21mm even though your ordinary 3.5-inch really hard push is about 147 x 101 x 26mm while weighing about a quarter of the weight. LTO-9 has a compressed capacity of 45TB (18TB uncompressed) with the subsequent era – probable to come in the 2nd fifty percent of this 10 years – doubling in capacity (certainly, there may well be some changes as it was the scenario going from Gen 8 to Gen 9).
A sealed LTO-based tape travel would probably be lighter, more affordable, eat/dissipate less electric power but also have additional onboard compute capabilities than your normal hard disk. Thicker and broader tape reels would also make it possible for significantly even bigger capacities (LTO-9 utilizes 1Km of tape with a 5.2µm thickness and 12.65mm width).
Western Electronic is uniquely positioned to transform this into a workable truth specially as it can use its skills in tricky drive parts. That new tape could, all issues viewed as, use a similar PCB and interface as an business challenging disk generate it does not need to have to have the traditional tape search.
Perhaps the major challenge is to acquire this novel method to tape to the LTO consortium, an organization that oversees the advancement of LTO and comprises IBM, HPE and Quantum, all of whom may perhaps have various commercial strategies that demand getting an expensive generate and low-cost tapes.