Fujifilm is one of them; there is another large player, but I can't
recall the name. Dang; I've been away too long now.
I do know that for the higher capacity drives, manufacturing the
media has become very difficult.
WRT to media lifetime, the current encoding technology contains a
massive amount of error correction composed on many different
complementary techniques that allow for seamless data "recovery"
during read operations even when there are large areas on the media
where the data has been corrupted (I can't qualitatively define
"large" here, but it's certainly as large as a large pinhole (yes,
that is small, but there is a lot of data contained in the area of a
"large pinhole" on a 12 TB tape cartridge).
On the other hand, we (STK) sold a tape drive that used helical
recording technology, and we had an engineer whose full-time job was
to recover data from tape carts that customers could not read (that
problem also earned me a patent for a way to recover data from
"curved tracks").
DaveD
On 11/1/2017 3:28 PM, Bob Macklin
macklinbob@... [hp_agilent_equipment] wrote:
toggle quoted message
Show quoted text
?
Who makes the tape these days? The 3M
and Ampex tape operations are gone.
?
Bob Macklin
K5MYJ
Seattle, Wa.
"Real Radios Glow In The Dark"
----- Original Message
-----
Sent: Wednesday,
November 01, 2017 2:10 PM
Subject: Re:
[hp_agilent_equipment] Re: HP Archives lost to fire.
?
That is good news. I was part of the StorageTek tape
team and later a member of the virtual tape team (for
sixteen years), up until this past January. Many, many
people with whom I had worked for decades are gone
from the real tape team. The virtual tape team was
also impacted, but to a lesser degree. I intend to pay
close attention going forward to what Oracle does with
these product lines.
The T10K tape drives are masterpieces of
electromechanical engineering, and the thought of that
going away has bothered me since the layoffs in
January.
Oracle could easily satisfy the needs of the cloud
using LTO drives. The only reason to keep the FICON
drives around would be for cloud applications that are
based on IBM MVS mainframes, which use the FICON
channel interface.
But, as you write, I never under (or over) estimate
what will happen in the future. It ain't my job to do
that anymore.
DaveD
On 11/1/2017 1:47 PM, Bob
Bownes
bownes@... [hp_agilent_equipment] wrote:
?
I speak not for my employer, but Oracle was
building their own tape drives as part of the
former StorageTek. There were some layoffs in that
organization, but the death of tape has not come
yet. In fact, I would speculate that one cannot be
a large cloud storage service provider without
owning an awful lot of tape.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a large
cargo aircraft full of mag tape. Sure, the latency
sucks¡:)
?
And tape is being looked at more closely
these days as the only unhackable storage
medium.
Until recently, Oracle (which was Sun which
was StorageTek) was selling IBM-compatible
tape drives with multi-TB capacities. I'm
pretty sure Oracle nuked that business
earlier this year.
DaveD
On 11/1/2017 9:44
AM, Dave McGuire
Mcguire@...
[hp_agilent_equipment] wrote:
?
On 11/01/2017 01:05 AM, Bob Macklin
macklinbob@...
[hp_agilent_equipment] wrote:
> Lived and worked in Silicon Valley
as an EE. First mostly in the
> magnetic tape industry?and in the
hard disk industry.
> ?
> The magnetic tape industry shrank
until all thaw left was Ampex. Ampex
> no longer makes disk drives. As far
as I can tell there are no tape
> drives being made any more.
That's incorrect; tape is still king in
terms of capacity and
reliability. IBM's recently-announced
TS2280 drive holds 12TB,
uncompressed, per cartridge.
While amongst some people (not you. more
"these kids today") it's
considered fashionable and "cool" to
dismiss tape as a passe' old
technology, the reality is different.
> I worked with a lot of the HP
analog instruments of the 60's. There
> seems to be no need for them
anymore as today's consumer electronics
is
> not repairable.
Whoa there, Sparky. There's more to
electronics than consumer gear,
and there's more to electronic work than
repair. I use and depend upon
those very instruments every day in the
course of my work.
> I also worked with the HP-2100
series computers in the 70's. I also
> worked with DEC and DG
minicomputers. They are gone now also.
Yes, the companies are gone, but not
forgotten. If you ever make it
to Pittsburgh, visit the Large Scale
Systems Museum for a personal tour
(and hack time, if desired) of some of
those machines, including an HP
2116B and more DEC PDPs than you can
shake a stick at, up and running.
> Where are Keysight's modern
instruments used? Is there any
electronic
> development being done in the US
today?
There's plenty of development being done
in the US today. That's the
space I work in; I see it every day.
Personally I'm a contract
electronic designer, based in
Pittsburgh. In the course of my work,
I've come to know many other guys (and
gals) doing the same thing I'm
doing, and I've worked with a lot of
companies who are doing it,
especially around here. (Pittsburgh is a
hotbed of technology today)
Things are pretty bleak in American
business today, but real design
work is far from dead. Much of it seems
to have moved to contract
design companies rather than in-house,
though.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA
