Let’s do a thought experiment.
Let’s assume we just never got hard drives to work all that well, head crashes are common and large storage capacities are only possible in servers with incredibly expensive anti vibration setups and what not and there’s no way they’d ever work in portable devices. And optical media just didn’t work out. Maybe somehow we didn’t discover the science in time and the companies working on it just failed or bad management decisions killed off the research into it before anything useful came off of it. And flash storage just never came down in price.
How far could we have pushed cassettes and tape if all the effort that went into other technologies had to be put into cassettes because there simply wasn’t a good alternative for data storage. What are the limits of how fast we could move tape in a cassette? How miniaturized would the technology be by now in 2023? I know that there are contemporary tape backup systems with large capacities but there hasn’t been any efforts into high speed seek times or making cassettes a viable tiny medium for use as removable media on PDAs or mobile phones.
If we could pack data densely enough and move the tape quickly enough how possible would modern computer tasks like high resolution digital video or image editing be? Assuming that we still had the high speed processors and non-persistent memory of the present but just no other data storage medium aside from magnetic tape.
For inspiration consider that in 1992 we had NT Cassettes that are about as big as an SD card an could store nearly a Gigabyte and in the enterprise LTO-9 tape (released in 2021) stores around 18 TB. So it doesn’t sound impossible to have tiny cassettes with a lot of storage if we spend the last 3 decades working on it.
Tape is still used for backup in industry, the newest LTO-9 tapes can store 45TB compressed per cartridge.
I’m aware of the enterprise backup solutions as mentioned in the main post. Still 45 TB are very impressive. But I was just wondering how diverse and powerful tape could be if it was the only viable storage solution. I’m assuming high speed rewinding and seeking and miniaturization would be something that the industry would have put a lot of effort into in that case, but for backup solutions those properties are less important.
In May 2014, Fujifilm followed Sony and made an announcement that it will develop a 154 TB tape cartridge in conjunction with IBM, which will have an areal data storage density of 85.9 GBit/in² (13.3 billion bits per cm²) on linear magnetic particulate tape.
In December 2020, Fujifilm and IBM announced technology that could lead to a tape cassette with a capacity of 580 terabytes, using strontium ferrite as the recording medium.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic-tape_data_storage
https://techxplore.com/news/2020-12-fujifilm-ibm-unveil-terabyte-magnetic.html
But I don’t think it is possible to achieve fast random access to different parts of the tape. The workaround would be having a ridiculous amount of RAM to cache loaded data.
it’s possible there’d be some kind of RAID micro-tape situation where data is stored on many smaller tapes that can all be seeking individually
*edit:
i think out usage patterns would also change… i could imagine a situation where you’re watching a movie, listening to music, etc and your data is redundantly stored say 3 times… a music playlist would seek to a song in the first storage tape, play sequentially, and seek the 2nd storage tape to the next song locationperhaps things like watching UHD movie content would be slower to start (similar kind of situation to downloading the movie from the internet for piracy) but the quality of the movie would be so high because storage density and bandwidth is high
certainly for interactive tasks like editing documents it’d be total ass no matter what, but again maybe we’d get used to “queueing up” tasks, opening more than we need in the background, etc
I’m incredibly unqualified to even think about how one might get faster random access times but i was imagining sci-fi solutions like looped tape so that you are always at most 1/2 of the tape length away from the point you want to reach, or the tape equivalent of multi actuator hard drives where there’s be multiple independent tapes in one cassette in a sort of RAID style thing but maybe instead of (only) striping data could be stored on multiple tapes in different places to always have one tape that is at a position close to the data you want. Or a system where the same tape has multiple read heads applied to it in distant places.
There are hard physical limits on tape; you can only make it so thin (ie; pack so much tape in a space) before it becomes too prone to snapping. You can only run it so fast before it becomes too prone to snapping. You can only change direction so fast before it snaps from the strain.
Fancy data storage and compression algorithms only get you so far. Barring ridiculous materials science advances for the substrate, I feel like the only real way to make it work would be to have massive amounts of RAM (probably battery-backed SRAM). Load the entire tape into a dedicated ramdisk and use it more or less the same way we use USB media now; data transfer that you have to safely eject (write back all changes).
That’s of course true, i was just wondering how far we could push it.
Okay, your other comments have actually got me thinking. So, instead of a hard disk with a rotating platter and moving head like a record, you could have maybe, a tape-loop cylinder and head that moves laterally along the rotational axis. Kinda like a really big, fast 8-track. With IDK, maybe nanoscale carbon as a substrate.
Oh hell imagine an NT cassette in a phone. Welp.
If there was no way to flatten the tape into a disc form, and solid stage storage would be impossible in higer capacities, I think it would lead to faster adoption of networking and “cloud”.
A datacenter could host thousands and thousands of tape mechanics with robotic cassette handling, and with some smart caching and data management could retrieve your data faster than it would take you to rewind and forwards to get that photo - never mind if you needed to change tapes.
The difference becomes even greater when you delete and overwrite stuff. I don’t know how it’s handled irl on tape data storage, but again a large center can just copy the data from a tape over to a new one without fragmentation.
I’d assume we wouldn’t have mobile phones at all
Do we really need our modern data storage for mobile phones? Mobile phones for sure would be very very different than our modern smart phones but mobile phone networks don’t sound impossible. Of course the internet would have to work very differently too, but maybe routing and forwarding could be done just with everything from RAM?
A simple mobile telephone could happen maybe, I should have written SMART phone - I just hate that term.
I think the furthest a cassette-based phone you could fit in your pocket could go is text messages. Definitely no apps or browsing a robust website with images
You could probably carry some apps on individual tapes with you? If it was all miniaturized enough and we can cache some things. Digital photos and videos would work too as that obviously has been done many years ago.
If you have to carry separate cassettes it’s beyond pocket-sized. Cassettes can only get so small since the spool has inherent thickness to it. I’m thinking the device would have to be bigger than the original gameboy
NT Cassettes were about the size of a full size SD card and maybe twice as thick and that was in 1992. Imagine what 31 years of research could have done to that technology!
I think if Sony could put a disk drive on a PSP it’s not too far fetched to store apps on a cassette.
The PSP drive isn’t a traditional disk drive, it’s a modified minidisc.
Idk how tape works exactly but re: high quality video. Can’t tapes be analog too? Which would mean high quality video could potentially be really high-quality?
I like how a Japanese copy of Chrono Trigger on the NDS was used in the comparison shot on the Wikipedia page for NT cassettes.
My favorite band put out an album on cassette tape this year and I bought it. Tapes are making a comeback, inexplicably.
