Tape's last legs

I’m not inclined to declare something dead just because it’s been around a long time. (I hope no one does that to me). I have defended tape as a backup medium, pointing out to colleagues that whatever else can be said about it, tape works. Moreover, large companies have racks and boxes full of tapes in climate-controlled storage, so they have to keep tape drives to read those archives. To do otherwise would be foolish, considering the trend toward archiving all data indefinitely.

At present, moving from tape to another medium looks like more trouble than it’s worth. But do your company the favor of tallying up the money it spends on tape cartridges. Vendors seem bent on driving blank tape prices to $100 each and standalone drive prices to $5,000 each. It’s ludicrous. The price of everything else IT buys is falling.

The trendy solution is to use hard drives for backup, but I can’t get excited about that idea. Whatever you use for backup is going to be manhandled. Hard drives are fragile compared to tape. Raw drives may be cheap, but the hot-pluggable shells in which they rest can double the cost. If you extract the drives from their shells to store them, the exposed circuit board on the bottom of the drive can be damaged from stacking and handling. One wrong move with a drive and your data is toast. If some vendor has a solution to these problems, I’d love to see it.

About two years ago, I took a pass on a fledgling optical technology from Panasonic called DVD-RAM. At the time, I was too drawn to more affordable DVD formats, especially DVD-RW, to give Panasonic’s idea much attention. Recently, I took a fresh look at the format recently because of the introduction of DVD Multi drives that burn three types of DVD discs: DVD-R, DVD-RW, and DVD-RAM. Of these, only DVD-RAM is a truly rewritable format. DVD-RW requires erasing an entire disc to reuse it. With DVD-RAM, you copy, move and delete files at will, just as you would on a hard drive. The capacity of a two-sided disc is 9.4GB; the more common one-sided disc holds half that. Its archival qualities are superb. Every version of Windows after XP includes native DVD-RAM support, as does Apple’s OS X.

The most serious drawback to the format is speed. The top native transfer rate of around 3MBps is dreadful compared to tape. However, since drives are so inexpensive ($299 is typical), it would be reasonable to use several drives at once, using each to back up a different set of files.

There is a solution on the horizon (12 to 24 months) that will address the limitations of DVD formats for data storage. A couple of months ago, for example, Sony started selling the first Blu-Ray device in Japan as a pricey video recorder. The Blu-Ray DVD uses a more precise laser that packs 27GB on each side of a CD-sized disc. Several other vendors have licensed the technology, so a push into the data-storage market is inevitable. But it will take time, not only to ramp up production, but to perfect the copy protection that content providers, such as movie studios, will demand. There are also competing high-density recordable DVD technologies in the pipeline from NEC, Toshiba, and Sanyo.

I expect that by 2006, you’ll have your pick of recordable drives and libraries capable of storing 25GB to 50GB on each side of a two-sided disc. When that kind of capacity is a reality, tape’s time will have finally run out.