https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3lseFxGfXM
LTO tape is a fascinating standard. The entire cartridge of tape is unwound to a spool inside the drive to access it. To eject the tape, it winds the entire tape back into the cartridge.
The highest capacity is 12TB. The data is not helical but stored in 6656 linear tracks. The head reads 32 tracks at a time & shifts to 208 possible offsets to access all the tracks. Intervleaved between the tracks are 5 wider tracks used for seeking. The tape is 960m long & 12mm wide for a total surface area of 11.5 square meters. An 8 platter hard drive has the same amount of data in under .1 square meters.
The drives are rated for 300MB/sec, which translates to a tape speed of 11mph. The entire 960m of tape would take 3 minutes to rewind at this speed, so they probably have an even faster mode for rewinding.
There's no capstan/pinch roller. Tape speed is regulated by data encoded on the tape. The reels have independent 3 phase sensored brushless motors. 1 motor is in braking mode while the other motor pulls, to manetane tension.
The tape drives are $4000, so they won't be replacing SD cards in cameras. Only 2 companies still make tapes & they're dying fast. The lion kingdom already waged a war against hard drives & lost.
Videotape started out as a linear format & evolved to a helical format before it died. Like the space program, it started out using the more advanced format it should have ended with & ended in the more primitive format it should have started with.
Imagine if video only came after tape had reached its current capacity & tape heads had reached their current density. Helical videotape would never have existed. VCRs would have used linear tracks that could be paused on a single frame & given much higher quality. The tape would unwind to a spool inside the VCR as the movie played & it would always rewind before ejecting.
The economies of scale of the higher quality tape might have made tape the only format we ever knew, preventing all the optical formats from getting a foot in the door.
LTO tape is a fascinating standard. The entire cartridge of tape is unwound to a spool inside the drive to access it. To eject the tape, it winds the entire tape back into the cartridge.
The highest capacity is 12TB. The data is not helical but stored in 6656 linear tracks. The head reads 32 tracks at a time & shifts to 208 possible offsets to access all the tracks. Intervleaved between the tracks are 5 wider tracks used for seeking. The tape is 960m long & 12mm wide for a total surface area of 11.5 square meters. An 8 platter hard drive has the same amount of data in under .1 square meters.
The drives are rated for 300MB/sec, which translates to a tape speed of 11mph. The entire 960m of tape would take 3 minutes to rewind at this speed, so they probably have an even faster mode for rewinding.
There's no capstan/pinch roller. Tape speed is regulated by data encoded on the tape. The reels have independent 3 phase sensored brushless motors. 1 motor is in braking mode while the other motor pulls, to manetane tension.
The tape drives are $4000, so they won't be replacing SD cards in cameras. Only 2 companies still make tapes & they're dying fast. The lion kingdom already waged a war against hard drives & lost.
Videotape started out as a linear format & evolved to a helical format before it died. Like the space program, it started out using the more advanced format it should have ended with & ended in the more primitive format it should have started with.
Imagine if video only came after tape had reached its current capacity & tape heads had reached their current density. Helical videotape would never have existed. VCRs would have used linear tracks that could be paused on a single frame & given much higher quality. The tape would unwind to a spool inside the VCR as the movie played & it would always rewind before ejecting.
The economies of scale of the higher quality tape might have made tape the only format we ever knew, preventing all the optical formats from getting a foot in the door.
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