AI's Data Deluge Revives Magnetic Tape as Fujifilm Plans 5x Output
Fujifilm to boost tape production 5x as AI fuels archiving demand
Fujifilm will spend about 10 billion yen (roughly $63 million) to quintuple its magnetic tape production capacity by fiscal 2028, citing "exponential growth" in data from generative AI. The investment targets its Odawara site in Kanagawa, the largest the company has made in dedicated LTO tape facilities, and centers on the latest FUJIFILM LTO Ultrium10 cartridge. Cloud and data center operators still favor tape for cheap bulk storage and air-gapped ransomware defense.
Given the sophistication of cyberattacks, magnetic tape is attracting increasing attention as a means of protecting data from threats such as ransomware.
- dylan604
Anyone that's never had the (dis)pleasure of working with tapes, there's some gotchas to know about before archiving and forgetting about it.
When you create an archive, do not skip the step of reading it back. I'm not talking about just having the system confirm it is readable. I mean actually restoring the data from the tape. I've had tapes fail to retrieve data off of the tape even though the writing app confirmed it was readable.
Drives can have issues reading data written by another drive. Drives can have issues reading a tape it wrote itself.
Why write one when you can write two at twice the time/cost? In all of my experience with tape, I've never written just one tape. In the early days of DVDs, the images were written to LTO to send to have the discs pressed. Two were always sent on the chance one wasn't readable and schedules were so tight that the loss of a couple of days to send a new tape would wreck delivery dates. Another facility wrote three tapes: one kept on site, one sent to IronMountain, one sent to the client directly. Plenty of occasions saw the local copy unreadable and the IronMountain copy was retrieved. These were managed by large robotic tape libraries so each tape was written in a different drive at the same time so it was 3x cost while only 1x time.
Use the drive cleaning cassette as recommended. Your dirty heads can cause the data to not be written/read correctly depending on which head is dirty. If you're having issues reading, clean the heads be […]
- pmw
If you want to take advantage of tape's low cost per TB for your own data backups, without the big capex of tape hardware, I heartily recommend rustic's cold storage support for Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive. It ends up being $1/TB/month, as long as you plan to not restore from it. (Use it as a secondary backup, and plan to restore from your primary.) I have been using rustic+GDA for about a year now, and I contributed some enhancements to this software ecosystem to make this path smooth for others. With this solution, I am no longer tempted to buy my own tape hardware!
[1]: https://rustic.cli.rs/docs/commands/init/cold_storage.html
- amelius
Why can't they make an attractively priced pro-sumer tape drive solution?
- doughnutstracks
I came across this website that provides LTO tape pricing references (I have no affiliation with the site).
LTO-10 30TB: $259–$300 per cartridge (~$8.63–$10/TB)
LTO-10 40TB: $491–$555 per cartridge (~$12.28–$13.88/TB)
LTO-9 18TB: $92–$129 per cartridge (~$5.14–$7.17/TB)
https://tapebackup.org/lto-tape-price-trend/lto10-price
One thing worth noting is that the tape cartridges themselves aren't necessarily the biggest expense. Standalone LTO-10 drives are currently listed at around $25,000.
- dzink
BluRay M-Disks are cheaper and more resistant to humidity / heat.
- dguest
The cost of tape is a big deal for for some bigger science experiments.
They often cost billions to build and they take loads of data, but most of it ends up heavily distilled by the time it goes to the final analysis pipeline, so keeping the raw data on tape is pretty common.
There was a time when tape was more specialized and we were worried about loosing our limited suppliers. The explosion in the ML that powers search and more recently the AI boom makes the technology look a lot more stable these days, which is a relief for us.
- Isamu
Tape is a fascinating technology, I recall reading the account of the SONY cofounder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_Japan:_Akio_Morita_and...
and the crazy things they were trying to make their own tape media because they had no supply because of the war. They were ultimately successful in creating a compact tape machine but they had to build up their expertise in tape media from literally nothing.
- inamberclad
If only they'd boost film production too