Tape Will Outlive Disk

I'm sure we have all been guilty of predicting the end of tape and saying that the whole world will be disk based in the future, myself included. Tape may indeed meet its demise, but it won't be at the hands of disk. Tape will outlive disk. Before you race down to the comments section and declare me certifiable let me explain.

Disk has one major challenge and one major challenger.

While the capacities of drives have continued to rise, the major challenge for mechanical drives is speed, or lack thereof. Disk spindles are limited today to 15k RPM and have been for a very long time. The first 15k RPM drive shipped almost a decade ago. Processing speeds did not increase over the last decade, or memory speeds, or network bandwidth speeds. Imagine having to use decade-old technology today -- when it comes to mechanical drive speeds, you are.

Tape does not suffer this affliction. Tape drive speeds have continually increased over that time, and while they still don't have the same random read/write speeds as disk, once you get tape going, if you can sustain it with a continuous data feed, it is very fast.

There's been plenty done to get around the per drive speed limitation: large RAID groups, larger and more sophisticated caches, short stroking drives, intelligent data placement on drives, the list goes on. But at the end of the day, storage software will be only able to do so much, especially when there is a more viable and very price competitive alternative available soon...SSD.As we discussed in our article, SSDs Are Cost Effective Now, the price decline continues unabated on solid state disk (SSD) drives and the capacities continue to increase. Add to this the substantial speed advantages that SSD enjoys over mechanical drives as well as the "greenness" of the SSD drives, and you are left with several compelling reasons to transition to SSD.

Now clearly disks won't be thrown out to the curb overnight, but their role acting as a primary storage medium to an archive and disk backup medium may be complete within the next five years. As tape technology progresses through advancements in speed and access, it may become the platform for rapid recoveries of systems that are not replicated. At that point disks will be relegated to single file recoveries that are not time sensitive (i.e. archives).

Eventually, your children's children will look at a mechanical disk like our children look at a floppy disks: something so primitive that they can't believe you ever used it.