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One of the interesting things about the slow-moving AI apocalypse we seem to be trapped in is watching the knock-on effects reverberate through communities and economies. We’ve seen how — and lamented that — the LLM-driven datacenter build up has increased demand for GPUs, RAM and SSDs directly, and we watched that in turn increase demand for traditional, spinning rust hard drives. Perhaps it was only a matter of time before demand came for the tapes, too. Yes, tapes: good old fashioned “sticky tape and rust”. With AI increasing demand for archival material, Fujifilm has announced they’ll be increasing production by 5x through 2028.
This production increase is specifically targeting about the latest and greatest 10th generation of Linear Tape, Open (LTO) which Fujifilm has produced since its inception. Indeed, Fujifilm has been in the tape storage business for almost as long as we’ve been storing data on magnetic tape, with their first forays into the field dating to the 1950s. The Ultrium10 tapes are available in 30 TB and 40 TB standard sizes, which are advertised as 75 TB and 100 TB based on a perhaps-optimistic 1.5:1 compression ratio. Given it’s already a linear standard and not exactly blazing fast at 400 uncompressed MB/s, there’s no reason not to compress the heck out of data being sent to cold-storage on tape. While not great by modern SSD or HDD standards, those are dizzying numbers if the last tape drive you used was a Datasette.
Still, it shows that the industry is reacting to the same trends that have hackers bringing surplus tape drives into their homelabs. This isn’t a small bet by Fujifilm, with 10 billion yen (about $63 million) at stake.
While some of us have been making more use of optical media these days, it looks like Sony isn’t reversing course on getting out of the Blu-ray business, so don’t expect to see giant disk changers coming to a server room near you. Tape bots are apparently a different story.
Header image: Fujifilm.
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