Clicked on link expecting to see a tape based key-value datastore.

mcantelon · on Jan 10, 2011

It's being worked on. There's a lot of overhead inherent in random access, which really isn't necessary for most applications. ;)

reitzensteinm · on Jan 10, 2011

That sounds interesting. Is it web scale?

EGreg · on Jan 10, 2011

yeah, you just insert your records in the only order you'd ever want to get them out

pepijndevos · on Jan 10, 2011

Hm, tape drives aren't even sold anymore, otherwise I might try.

moopark · on Jan 11, 2011

Sure they are -- tape libraries are still sold, primarily for backups, eg:

http://www.quantum.com/Products/TapeLibraries/index.aspx

http://www.dell.com/us/en/enterprise/storage/tapebackup_auto...

whatusername · on Jan 11, 2011

If you ever get a chance to poke around a large corporate data center -- see if you can check out a SL8500 or one of the TS3500 units.. They're the big things with all kinds of flying robotic arms and crap-loads of storage. Just don't try and walk inside one while the robots are moving.

For reference -- an LTO5 Tape holds about 3TB of data. (and has decent compression -- so that could go much higher)

gwern · on Jan 10, 2011

It may not be a bad idea to borrow old tape-drive ideas for modern technologies - I mean, hard drives are ever slower compared to cache or RAM, and they are faster at linear seeks (like tapes) than random-access. Hard drives are the new tape?

whatusername · on Jan 11, 2011

Tapes are the new Hard Drive.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape_File_System

A Random Access Filesystem that runs on LTO5. (And it even supports OSX!) Cool hack. Just don't ask me why they bothered.

thirdstation · on Jan 10, 2011

yeah, me too. a NoSQL replacement for tar.