Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach him to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. Ban fish and the man gets into farming and animal husbandry and doesn't need you anymore.
This misses the point. If you gave all of the F-35 IP to India they would still be incapable of developing the indigenous industries required to build a 5th generation fighter in a similar amount of time.
I think that misses the point too. If China has such competent indigenous aerospace industries then they shouldn't be relying on foreign designs for their engines and aircraft. If everyone else can design a proper 5th gen aircraft, why can't China?
Part of China's overall strategy, since the theft of the Su-27 design, has been to exploit foreign concepts to give their military a modern-looking edge. But it's purely a paper tiger - China does not have the industry to even match the engine performance of USSR designs. Hundreds of their J-11 designated Su-27s fly with Russian engines and their current fleet almost entirely relies on potential engine overhauls to meet their minimum operational requirements. The PLA Air Force is an optimistic application of technologies that do not yet exist in the hope that one day it will achieve the desired tactical effect.
We can see the effects of this strategy already. China's J-35 has been reportedly very unstable during flight with avionics and engines only reaching basic functionality. Of course, there is no F-35B clone either, so they've really only implemented the least-strategic models with what sounds like a skin-deep reverse-engineering job. China stole the designs to look tough, and now they're hiding the prototypes before they embarrass them in action. You might as well have just given the designs to India at that point, at least they're honest about their reliance on Russian technology.
I think it's not year 2000 anymore. PLAAF has been on indigenous turbofan more performant than USSR ALs for years. They are no longer reliant on RU engine imports for new/modern platforms, unless for old hardware where it doesn't make sense to re-engine, i.e. the oldest blocks of J11... even J11 post block2 (2010s) have transitioned to domestic engines. The 300s+ of J16 that supercedes J11... domestic engines. Navalized J15 last to transition, but again, now on domestic engines. Areas where they're around parity (i.e. high bypass) they're still making USSR/RU derriviative designs indigenously... hence the actual point, these are engines built in PRC because PRC actually has COMPETENT domestic aero sector to build them - hand plans to India and most other countries including most advanced economies and they simply can't because they lack requisit industrial base.
There's zero credible news on J35s unless you go full retard on Indian or FLG defense writing. Who else can redesign a proper 5th gen except US and PRC. There's a reason USAF aggressor squad to mimick PRC 5th gen J20s uses actual F35s, while aggressor for RU 5th gen is F18s. And why would PLAAF they clone the strategic boondoggles that is F35Bs? STOVL F35B has crippled range for IndoPac theatre to the point where it's essentially irrelevant while mere existence has been largest source of fuckup for the entire F35 program due to common components requirement that dragged the other models down. There's a reason NGAD and other next gen programs are doubling down on range. Why supercarriers sticking with F18s while F35Bs are stuck on amphibs. The actual effects of PRC's successful indigenous aerospace strategy/procurement is throwing US 6GEN program into conniptions - NGAD isn't going back to drawing board after 10 years of development to have entire CONOPS reevaluated because of SU57. It's because PRC aerospace got very competent, very fast in last 15 years.
TBH I think F35 obese/fat/baluga Amy looks nice because it's bulky like harrier. But I also really dug the charm of slack jawed X32. Seeing stealth coatings on these fat birds is like watching goofy kids pull off sick fits.
> Who else can redesign a proper 5th gen except US and PRC.
We don't even know if China's jets are 5th gen. The J-20 is a joke compared to the F-22 despite having 20 of lead time since America's 5th gen debut. If the US is using F-35s to simulate dogfighting a Chinese dual-engine air superiority platform, it's a sign they don't take them entirely seriously. After all, the F-16 is technically a better dogfight aggressor in USAF simulations.
China is starting to see the fruits of their own aerospace investments, but they clearly haven't got parity even with the US's oldest 5th gen inventory. China is too cagey with J-35 information for a serious comparison to the F-35. The J-20 was laughed out of the room when it was announced it couldn't supercruise without engine overhauls, and it still struggles to hit Mach 2 with a combat load. The H20 hasn't even been formally unveiled yet, and it's doubtful it will reach feature parity with the B-2. The entire lineup is inherently questionable.
> And why would PLAAF they clone the strategic boondoggles that is F35Bs?
Uhh... Naval operations?
Look, you're entirely right about the gimped range and the G limits of the F-35B. But the US selected it because there are damning tactical implications from a stealth fighter that can VTOL and carry AMRAAMs. The dogfighting specs really aren't even that relevant if you can get the standard A2A compliment into the air fast enough to fight. The value an F-35 can provide on the deck of an amphib or destroyer is immense and unmatched by any adversary. Screw the smaller range, you're on a goddamn boat! China would absolutely make the F-35B... if they could.
> NGAD isn't going back to drawing board after 10 years of development to have entire CONOPS reevaluated because of SU57.
NGAD can take as long as it needs. There isn't credible competition to America's air superiority platforms and any PRC victory in the Pacific, now or in the forseeable future (next 5-10 years), would have to be won through attrition. China knows this, it's why their shipyards are at-capacity in anticipation of needing the materiel. Taiwan manufactures their own antishipping missiles and America has 50 years of stockpiled AGM-84s. A balls-to-the-wall engagement between both powers could result in a hundred sinked ships in one day. The Taiwan strait is small, and once the PRC goes mask-off they'll have to hide every part of their Navy they don't want destroyed.
I don't doubt that NGAD is taking the PLAAF into account, but I'm pretty sure they know that China's 5th gen jets struggle to maintain 4th generation operational capacity. America's foothold on 5th gen air combat is tenured and proven - China is clinging to a marketing bark over bite strategy that most people have rightfully ignored. If China was certain in their tactical capabilities then they would also copy the United State's strategy of limiting their aircraft inventory. The mass production is a tacit admission that China intends to destroy a lot of J-20s and J-35s.
And we don't even know if US jets are 5th gen. What recent official US documentation that dismiss J20 as not 5th gen (except PLA old classification system that -1 gen across board). Using 5th gen as aggressor to simulate 5th BECAUSE 5th gen isn't about kinematics (i.e. F16) - it's about sensors and other capabilities, why 4th gen gets stomped by 5th gen chillaxing from BVR. Why F35 fine with being more sluggish multirole vs F16.
It's well known PRC turbojet is not at parity with US, but it's also competitive - i.e. not many generations behind, and by all credible accounts have surpassed RU in recent years. The point is they went from having to import engines to having entire supply chain to build 100s of cores at scale, FULLY DOMESTICALLY within last 10 years. That's not just fruits, that's an orchard in terms of statusquo disruption.
>F35Bs
I don't think PLA wouldn't make SVTOL with gimped range if they could, because SVTOL trade for range morely optimized for IndoPac/PRC backyard. SVTOL was good compromise for marines wanting to keep VTOL and select F35 partners with amphib size carriers when program was conceived 30+ years ago, when range/operations was designed around NATO conflict where SVTOL was strategic using makeshift and RU was just across the horizon. That's made increasingly irrelevant now that longer range strikes are proliferating to the point where liability of gimped range means launch platforms (amphibs) can't even operate close enough to launch, which is extra but kick when gimping Bs also gimped A, Cs.
> competition to America's air superiority
The credible competition is the entire PLA concentrated in theatre to prevent US from establishing air superiority in the first place, so in that sense NGAD can take as long as needed because there likely isn't an NGAD CONAP that works againsts PLA, hence the program reset. I would say there isn't a credible way for US to establish/sustain air superiority because superior US aviation can't be sustained. But you're right about attrition, PRC fine with losing entire PLAN if it means US loses entire USN, since PRC has 300x+ ship building capacity to reconsitute faster post war, and global security architecture breaks when USN gone.
> they know that China's 5th gen jets struggle to maintain 4th generation
Again which reports suggest US/DoD thinks PRC struggle with 5th gen operating as 4th gen. What's being written suggest they know the opposite. Excessive amount of words reports have been written on PLA aviation in last 5 years... the opposite of "rightly ignored"... it's borderline fixation. I uppose to mass production of F35s is tacit admission that US is going to lose F35s. Or USAF regrets deprecating all the tooling for F22s when they realized need to for more 5th gen airframes.
>limiting their aircraft inventory
J20 for F22, J35 fo F35 in high/low 5th gen mix. So they are, in fact replicating US high/low mix. J20 production is only 100 / year, about F35 production. The parsimonious interpretation - maturing Chinese aerospace is at point to match US in production, they want 2500+ 5th gen fleet just like US. Short/medium term they're just trying to close the 200 vs 600 5th gen airframe gap. If anything it's tacit admission they're comfortable enough with their 5th gen efforts to mass produce. Or that procurement wise, US seems to be the one who is NOT certain of their 5th gen, holding on to F18s, and now F15EX to plug the low mix gap, while figuring out how to modernize high mix with NGAD.
> It's well known PRC turbojet is not at parity with US, but it's also competitive
Yeah, and I'm not trying to dunk on the value of mass-producing mediocre turbojets. The JF-17 is a masterclass in taking an okay engine and selling it in a package that makes it immensely more valuable. China's cruise missiles have come into a class of their own with a wide variety of cheap expendable engines to pick from; few others are as willing to export it with no questions asked. Making last-gen jets is a booming business.
That being said, you can't really write off the "-1" generation jets because a lot of them haven't been upgraded to anything else. There's certainly a lot of potential to get them into the sky with better engines later down the line, but quite literally that technology doesn't exist in many cases. The J-35 comes with two engines - count 'em, two.
> That's made increasingly irrelevant now that longer range strikes are proliferating to the point where liability of gimped range means launch platforms (amphibs) can't even operate close enough to launch
That's where naval aviation shines, though. The Taiwan strait is tiny - once China presses the red button it will be very easy to identify and attack both the primary airfields China relies on as well as any ships in port. Having a high number of amphibs operating in formation with a few Arleigh Burkes escorting a supercarrier puts extreme pressure on an already strained PLAA/PLAN. With China's investment in naval capacity it's surprising to see them put so much emphasis on a CATOBAR approach that presents such an easy target for adversaries. I think STOVL is highly underestimated in wartime, but we've yet to see a real engagement that tests it so I'll agree to disagree if you'd prefer.
> I uppose to mass production of F35s is tacit admission that US is going to lose F35s.
The US has export obligations, and they're pretty far behind on delivered F-35s by most accounts.
The interest in China's aviation capacity isn't really an indictment of their superiority either. It's mostly reciprocal at this point - Chinese journals had obsessed over American capabilities for the past 2 decades, so now America wants to see what they've learned. In some places they've learned a lot - in other places they're making plainly inflated claims.
> US seems to be the one who is NOT certain of their 5th gen, [...] while figuring out how to modernize high mix with NGAD.
And I don't think that's a bad spot to be in. The F-22 has been on it's way out for some time now - the writing was on the walls if you look at the financials. The F-35 had a troubled development but it's rollout hasn't been markedly worse any other stealth aircraft. F/A-18s and F-15s are going to continue to stick around as missile trucks, but they too will be replaced, maybe even the B-21 if it's AESA radar is good enough.
At the end of the day, you gotta look at it like this; China is overpromising and underdelivering on a relatively constant basis. They did good, and their game of catch-up has yielded them competent advancements and even marketable tech for export. America still did 5th gen better, albeit at extreme expense, and designed their own jets from scratch to boot. If you are afraid of China's plainly fear-coded marketing lifted straight out of Soviet strategy, you're probably also the sort of person that stands up and claps to the TV when Tim Cook says "best iPhone yet" every year.
So does F18, F15... NGAD renders as well. Current theories on NGAD cost cutting design would fall back to 1 engine, because 1 engine is compromise, especially for naval aviation that prefers redundancy. Hence F35B stovl requirements fucking up rest of models due to commonality requirements that limited F35s to single engine, which is why design driving next gen of development moving towards more purpose built airframes for each service requirements... and for 6gen, essentially every 6gen program currently is presumably going to be, from prototypes to renders, 2 engines, kf21, TF Kaan, Tempest/GCAP, FCAS... everyone is reverting back to 2 engines. Count'em, two.
Not to writing off 1 engine. US aero is sufficiently advanced/reliable/optmitized to get away with 1 engine for some fighters, and koodoos for that. But there's also benefits to 2 engines (kinematically, i.e. theres things superhornets are much better optmized for that F35s are not). Having to run 2 engines because 1 engine performance bad would be valid cope if not for the fact that 2 engines also have advantages and and disadvantages can be mitigated through industrial base... i.e. if you can churn out tons of cores to equip 1000s of twin engine fighters, it's not an issue and maybe net benefit. Especially during war when airframes would get shot before components reach end of life. 4th gen fighters are either going to get replaced or shot down, J11s running old RU engines that's PIA to maintain matters less in that context.
>naval aviation shines
I think that's where naval aviation becomes increasingly irrelevant. When IRBMs pushes A2D2 amphibs from operating useful distances. Wargames trying to interdict in TW scenario has CSHs operating from outside 2IC, with tanking in between for the hope you can get carrier air wings in range while keeping carrier at safeish distances (where PLA can "only" deliver 100s of AsHMs instead of 1000s). That bubble is going to get further, meanwhile amphibs+stovl are stuck in bubble where they can't operate permissively, or at at all without being hit by AShMs in 30 minutes. Hence war games that presumes US have chance _require_ distributed and hardened 1IC basing (mainly AGILE in JP). The expectation in planning/procurement (i.e. state of US ship building) for naval aviation is low relative to shelthering air frames under a shit load of concrete on land, even if land closer. TLDR is in TW scenario where STVOL mattered, PRC has already lost, because F35Bs mattering means US operating completely right next to PRC or with uncontested tanking, i.e. not just air supremacy, but utterly crippling PLA mainland fires.
I also don't think PRC is putting so much emphasis on catobar or even carrier OPs in general. PLAN carrier procurement is glacial relative to industrial capacity. 2.5 carriers in 15 years is indicator of being profoundly not serious about carriers, versus PLAN churning out subsurface even when their subs were shit. And now by accounts PLAN 1gen behind US in SSN, and they're building out shipyards that can pump 4-6 SSNs per year. They're serious about subs.
>bad spot to be in
Nor is it a "good" spot to be in. Rejiggering air composition to backstop with 4th gens for roles planners wanted to task with 5th gens because 5th gen and now 6th gen programs haven't delivered to expectations is no thte spot US planners wanted or anticipated to be in.
>interest in China's aviation / China is overpromising and underdelivering on a relatively constant basis / inflated claims
What inflated claims? That PRC can in fact build 5th gen fighters, like DoD/officials recognize? What credible reporting suggest PLA 5th gen performs like 4th gen... that J35 has basic functionality? There was like one report from early 2010s abotu J35/FC31 prototype experiencing difficulties during initial test, i.e. on par with F35 can't fly in lightening, have serious avionic issues 10+ years ago. But no one pretends F35 isn't 5th gen because of intial (and ongoing) teething issues. I did not suggest PRC aviation superiority, but pointing out none of official/credible writngs suggest PLA is making inflated claims... because anyone who watches PLA is frustrated by just how little PLA make claims. At the end of the day, PLA is notoriously opaque, if anything the pattern is rarely over promise anything and deliver out of the blue, i.e. systems get acquired and revealed much later than western MIC reporting. Past 10 years of PLA engine development are countless articles of them talking about technical difficulties and delays and only recently celebrating indigenous self sufficiency / passing RU aerospace. Versus the shitshow that is F35 program, where most popular discourse is parrots lockheed marketing materials vs dod reporting. Or unending wank over NGAD even months before program explodes. If there's anything to be afraid of, it's how LITTLE PRC markets, meanwhile analysts have to count tail numbers from social media photos or airframes from satellites to get actual sense of PLAAF buildup.
Soviet engines were always bad with low hours between overhaul. They didn't think reliability was important if it was just going to be lost in the first hours of WW3.
I always don’t understand this argument? By this logic, should every companies publicise their trade secrets and redact all the copyright and patents to maintain a dominant market position?
That would be a reasonable strategy. Businesses built on trade secrets are quite workable but strategically weak because if the secret gets rediscovered they have a real problem. It is better to use a strategy of real advantages. And there are some really interesting case studies here the big tech companies actually rely from an environment where open source is big.
The real issue with IP is that it is an artificial government monopoly and largely unjustified. As we see in China, if you want to grow at maximum speed it makes more sense to operate without respect for IP law because it is an anchor. We saw something similar in the US where it was the in-practice failure of IP law to be executed that allowed the software ecosystem to thrive. Banning people from implementing good ideas has devastating economic consequences.
You're missing a few components here: time and originator investment.
No advantage, resources aside, is permanently durable. Most are instead temporary advantages -- advantages when you have a technology but your peers do not. IP enforcement is one tool to maintain that window of advantage.
China, like US before it, grew at maximum speed when it was reverse engineering already discovered technologies and applying them.
Like the US, it has already begun to pivot towards IP-enforcement, as it begins to originate novel technologies. To do otherwise is to pretend that copying competitors' discoveries and making them yourself cost the same -- and it very much doesn't.
> Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach him to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. Ban fish and the man gets into farming and animal husbandry and doesn't need you anymore.
Eh, you're misusing the saying in an inappropriate way. It's about fostering self-sufficiency in people you want to help. It's not really applicable to rivals and enemies.
In this case, the hubris of the 1990s cause the US to get into this relationship with China, and now that's going to have to unwind somehow (and doing that in a 5-D chess way is unrealistic). And anyway, it's not like China's goal was to remain dependent on Western tech forever, it's plan is to become self-sufficient on its own terms on its own timetable, and the best the US can hope to achieve is cause some disruption and mess that timetable up.
It’s niche enough to be a major industry. Cold storage at extreme scales for very low cost is higher value than it appears - there’s a lot of data that isn’t worth very much individually but has extremely high value if it’s ever needed - but you can’t know ahead of time which data that is. That’s all about ultra low price per gb storage that’s high durable.
This idea adds a fast SSD cache to a slow access bulk archive.
Obviously that cache can massively accelerate repeated access to the same data, and reduce tape wear and mechanical wear and energy usage.
But I think the critical issue is where you want the cache to be. Because end point devices already have local cache.
So this product only seems to have a big advantage on applications where you expect many unique users to access the same archive data for the first time, and within a short period of time before it expires from the tape drive’s SSD cache.
This is why I think it’s a small niche. Maybe too small to be worthwhile.
Edit: it also has the disadvantage that the first few devices to try to access the data would have a huge delay for a minute or more while the data is located on the tape. It’s also vulnerable to DDOS by attackers requesting random cold data, to fill the SSD.
- Archive for the film industry. 2 minutes to retrieve an archived take is a good compromise of cost and time.
- Archive for the recording industry. 2 minutes to recover the "master tapes" when you remaster for the umpteenth time is a good compromise of cost and time.
- The product I work on has requirements to archive data for a year / 10 years / 20 years and then generate a report. A 2 minute delay is perfectly acceptable.
My workplace archived old builds of our product. It’s very rare that we need them, but we do need them occasionally. We’d happily take 1 hour latency to be able to cheaply store more of them.
That is not niche at all.
Pretty much any gov't, corp, etc that needs long term achives could do with faster access. 2 min is light speed since it's low(er) cost/decade/gb
If you want to build something like youtube, you could store the data from a start of a video, and data defining a slower resolution stream, and more popular videos on the lower latency parts of tapes in your storage arrays, and while the video plays you could go get the rest from the higher latency places.
You could also predict What is the next video the user will want.
Also, the 2 minute seek time is from one end of the tape to the other.
But you could also move accross tracks, vertically so that gives another route for short seek times for some of your data.
So it might be possible to build something with a reasonable performance.
They'd probably have an easier time getting people to watch ads if they had a message: "please enjoy this message from our sponsor while we wait for your video to be retrieved from the offline archives".
That's true, but this is considerably more convenient than traditional tape. Tape as is requires specialty equipment and careful handling, if I understand the above product proposition correctly, it's just plug and play. Right now, only an enthusiast would use tape in their home setup, with this approach, anyone could use it for their backup server or w/e.
But, "never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of hard drives".
The intriguing use case (thinking as a consumer) is ~2tb "hot", and effectively treating the remainder tape as kindof "append-only/WAL" (and: e.g. incremental backups).
I have been randomly ripping my DVDs, mostly keeping the transcoded MP4s, but hesitant to delete the ISO's because they require physical handling and _time_ to re-rip.
If it's ~2min to seek to an 8gb ISO, that's potentially faster than re-downloading it from somewhere offsite, and would match my hypothetical use cases really well.
Keeping a local ~2tb drive backed up to a ~4tb+40tb "ssd-tape-hard-drive" is probably cheaper than most long-term cloud stuff (backblaze ~$6/tb/mo!!, glacier ~$4/tb/mo, but with lots of asterisks on retrieval time), and simpler than messing around with a NAS.
I see lot of reasonable use cases, say something like Internet Archive or library in general. Keep the frequented stuff in more hot cache and then rest of the stuff in colder storage. Without having to actually think about the process.
Similar could be some new media production company. Archive B-roll or parts of older videos and then have the stuff you use very common available much faster.
This could be easily improved by keeping track of what's on the tape where in part of the SSD, like a length-based filesystem. Then it is just a matter of seeking to that length of tape and finding the actual start of the data. You could take the seek time for cold data to just a couple dozen seconds.
I'm not sure why people still need tape storage or hybrid SSD and tape storage, is it because of banking financial transactions recording requirements since the SSD storage now has similar or better storage capacity?
The reported storage size for the hybrid MED is 72TB and Micron now has 60 TB for single SSD drive [1].
Huawei has even higher storage capacity with reported 128 TB in a single SSD drive [2].
Size per dingus is somewhat irrelevant to the use case: what's it matter if you buy 10 things that take up a rack or 20 things that take up a rack - how much did it cost to store all of your data at the speed you needed? Modern tape still has extremely good $/TB. If you have a LOT (and I don't just mean a fews 100s of TB) of data you need to keep but don't need to be able to access all of it constantly then tape can still save you a metric boatload of money on TCO vs SSD or HDD.
Dual tier systems are for when a small amount of that data may be hot at any given time (like you say, financial often has a lot of active data in a pool of tons of inactive data they can't throw out. Medical is another example). Rather than manual manage this you just run a 2 tier system that automatically bumps things in and out of high $$$, high performance storage banks to low $, high capacity storage banks transparently.
Cheap and very very reliable archival storage (essentially no failure modes other than the magnetic media itself), weight and volume wise pretty much still the best density you can get 18TB (up to 45 with compression) in a small 200g package is hard to beat when you need to move peta bytes around.
Also tape is much cheaper to produce than platters especially at large volumes.
I don’t know but over the counter direct purchase single unit LTO 9 tapes are about £70-80 each in the UK for 18TB, in large volumes they are much cheaper, I’ve seen quotes in the £30 per tape and that wasn’t at a cloud provider or even massive enterprise scale or anywhere close to that.
In the 1980s or 90s, Jim Gray predicted that in the far future memory hierarchy would be reduced to main memory + tape.
Not sure that prediction holds up (although streaming dbs in the cloud seem awfully "tape-like" to me?), but I did attempt to quickly redo his "5 minute rule" calculations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42125052
If I did the math right, there's no point to swap or paging anymore, as the break-even point I got was evict after 1 week* (instead of 5 min) for random access patterns, and evict after 5 hours for sequential access patterns.
These days maybe those breakeven calculations would be more useful for deciding how long to keep something in a register and when it'd be better to recalculate or spill to main memory?
* of course, if you keep everything in main memory and forget nothing, we're close to what in 1998 was one of McCarthy's pipe dreams: Elephant2000 http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/elephant/elephant.html ; I guess if I were to attempt something like Elephant2038, it'd wind up looking like a bunch of past-oriented LTL formulae?
(the "speech acts" were probably Winograd's influence?)
(for Xφ, I prefer to define it as relative to a given frame: φ holds the next time any of the frame variables change, which allows both continuous<->discrete translation and for Lamport's stuttering [to allow abstraction!])
Next up: GC via creation and annihilation operators? (in my algebraic view of informatics, one is often either structuring by cleaving two parts to make a whole, or destructuring by cleaving a whole into two parts)
EDIT: and by past-oriented I mean using "was ever" for "eventually" and in the past for "globally", as well as "since" for "until". rotate t by i^2. Eg
dirty := F{edit} U ({save} ∨ {load})
says the local buffer differs from the cloud if there was ever an edit since a save or load.
EDIT 2: ...and I'm pretty sure I can autogenerate code that turns these kinds of def'ns into an imperative event-driven state machine; one can of course come up in theory with formulae that require an arbitrarily complex implementation, but I think in practice most def'ns (especially if we provide backpressure by signalling the complexity of the resulting imp) would be satisfied with simple ones.
There are no downsides to keeping off-cloud physical backup sets of most critical data in a firesafe or two (and still needed for SOC 2 compliance I understand)
> Aug 23: CloudNordic said: “The attackers succeeded in encrypting all servers’ disks, as well as on the primary and secondary backup system, whereby all machines crashed and we lost access to all data.”
I think makes perfect sense for archiving. I keep hearing tapes last 30 years, while in the same room temperature SSDs last a few years. Just wish I could find a solid source for it!
A worn-out SSD is supposed to be able to preserve its data for one year for consumer SSDs or three months for enterprise SSDs (not at the same temperature). That's the industry-standard threshold of data retention used to determine how "worn out" is considered end-of-life. A SSD that hasn't burned through its entire write endurance will have considerably longer data retention.
We're not talking about write endurance though? From what I've read, unpowered SSDs only hold the data for a year or two, regardless of the age of the drive.
> From what I've read, unpowered SSDs only hold the data for a year or two, regardless of the age of the drive.
You've probably been reading bad sources. There is a very real relationship between the number of P/E cycles that a piece of flash memory has been through and the unpowered data retention it can provide. Lots of publications and even more random forum posts repeat statements about SSD data retention without including the caveat that the numbers apply specifically to worn-out drives. Brand new flash memory can easily have unpowered data retention in excess of a decade.
If you're reading a source that claims SSD unpowered data retention is only a year, and that source does not qualify that with a statement about the prior condition of the drive, you should assume that you're reading another misinterpretation of the JEDEC standards.
You can buy LTO tapes from Amazon and office suppliers easily.
The drives and the software are the problem.
Drives are very expensive and there isn’t much non enterprise software to manage tape backups.
Enterprise software is expensive and you won’t likely be even able to buy it and since cloud storage and NAS became commoditized all the backup software that targeted small businesses pretty much either died off or went cloud backup only.
Tape has a tremendous density advantage over disks. Think about how much area a tape occupies if you were to completely unroll it, and compare that to a disk platter. The flip side is access times are extremely long compared to disks, but for the usual application of backup and recovery that doesn't matter much. In this case they're pairing the tape with faster non-volatile storage so writes at least will be very quick (reads not so much, 2 minute access time!)
The 2min number is likely an average over a large volume of drives.
An LTO 9 tape has over a kilometer(!) of tape in it.
You can spool the tape only so fast without risking damage to either the tape itself or the cartridge so if your file is at the end of the tape you’ll be waiting for a while.
It's a single tape. Even without any kind of fast forward, the write speed of LTO-9 is 6 meters per second. It takes three minutes to go completely end to end.
Nice idea to integrate all the moving parts in the same cartridge. Probably the economics are favorable now a days. If the components for tape drives are cheap it makes sense to put them in the cartridge and skip all the moving parts in the robot. The question is if the money can be recouped on maintenance saving? Tape robots are quite reliable but comes paired with an expansive support contract to ensure it’s running 24/7. Or maybe the purported cost saving is in the initial procurement? The LTO stuff has always been somewhat pricey.
Has it ever been revealed what Amazon is using to back Glacier. I had heard a lot of speculation including some sort of custom optical disk. Anyone know?
China is a country of over 1 billion people. It has advanced and surpassed many Western countries in the span of just 40 years. Trying to put a leash on them with sanctions is futile, hostile, and will only increase their determination. We should be trying to find common ground and working with them instead of fabricating another boogeyman for no reason.
Indeed, why not find common ground with a totalitarian regime that conducts genocides and violently suppresses democracy and dissent
take it from an old man that was born in eastern europe in another totalitarian regime, I've seen it in practice, I've seen the horrors behind closed doors: appeasement never works and only prolongs the suffering of the people.
lmaoo for everything that works they wouldn't be called appeasement, just treaty.
Is Paris Peace Accords an appeasement that doesn't work? It sealed the demise of the non-communist South Vietnam, but no one cared about South Vietnam today aside of fringe Vietnamese in California.
Look at China's neighbors. I'm sure the solution to their conflicts with China is "finding common ground and working with them". Would you have told Ukraine the same thing about Russia before Russia invaded? Hell, do you say it now?
No, I have always been strongly on Ukraine's side. The war began because diplomacy failed. We do not want the same to happen with Taiwan - again, we should be trying to find common ground and deescalate the situation. Sanctions are a band aid and escalate, and they only work for so long.
I didn't say that, or imply that, and it would make no sense for that to be my stance given that I said I support Ukraine. At least put some thought in before you hit reply.
Unironically yes since China wont move geographically from its position for million of years, US can be distracted by something else somewhere and pivoted from Asia, but China wont. It stays there.
I like your optimism but this ship sailed a long time ago.
If you are outside the US and China it is hard not to empathize with the Chinese annoyance with the do-as-we-say-not-as-we-do “rules based order”, and deciding to play the exact game on the US that the US has played with everyone else.
ELI5: I’ve lost track of tape storage technologies. When does it make sense to use tape backup at home? Most people rely on cloud services or external hard drives for backing up large files like family photos and videos. But is there a point—like a certain amount of data—where it becomes convenient to use tape instead?
On the surface, this might seem like a simple question, but let me elaborate with an example: think about storing unavailable movies on high-quality 2K/4K/8K content. Would tape backup be a good fit for this kind of use at home?
The main problem with tape storage at small scales (including home use) has always been that tape drives are relatively expensive (several thousand dollars new), and buying just one makes it a single point of failure for your backup system. If your data set can fit on one or two dozen hard drives, then hard drives are the cheaper option (unless you keep them powered up and spinning 24/7).
> When does it make sense to use tape backup at home?
Never. Tape only makes sense
for true cold storage-ie. business-critical backups that are only going to be read back in case of emergency, where a couple days to retrieve the data is an acceptable compromise. "Movies I don't watch very often" are not 'cold' enough- it's just not worth the hassle of switching tapes and maintaining the entirely different infrastructure for even finding the right tape and reading the data. And while the price of the media is attractive, even second hand drives are prohibitively expensive and packed with moving parts to break down. If you really have a use case for offline backups at home BD-R is much more accessible (and I did look into this recently for the same use-case; unfortunately optical disk robots are still out of the reach of enthusiasts too. Could be a cool DIY project though...)
The tape market is highly price-fixed and innovation-restricted. Intel has more or less of a total monopoly in this space. It's essentially LTO or go home. Your one and only option is enterprise grade hardware at enterprise prices. Even on eBay, prices are well beyond what I'd consider consumer-accessible. Your best bet is to piece together a fiber channel system and hope you get lucky on a cheap used drive.
IBM is wholly uninterested in selling tape to consumers, so you aren't going to have a good time trying to use it anyway.
Throughout my career, folks have asked me to look at tape for a wide range of uses, and even after investing a bunch of time and money, my conclusion is: few users need tape. For the vast majority of users, hard drives represent the pinnacle of tradeoffs in capacity, performance, and long-term reliability.
tape storage would be perfect for storing movies. There is not much random access and it's cheap. Also need it to last 100 years would be a good selling point. DVDs work but they do fail over time. Still waiting for that holographic or DNA storage.
If you need to store the entire Netflix catalog, then yes, tape would be the way to go here. If you're just storing your own personal collection, then definitely not. It's much cheaper to just buy or build a NAS with some large HDDs and store your entire library there, plus you can have immediate access to it any time with Jellyfin or Plex. The problem with tapes is that the tapes themselves aren't that cheap, and the drives are prohibitively expensive and require an HBA card (even more money). On top of that, enterprise software for tape management is horrifically expensive (and you probably can't buy it anyway as an individual), or you have to manage them manually at the command line with `tar > /dev/tape`. Even worse, if your tape drive dies (it is a complex mechanical item with lots of moving parts after all), then to read your tape library, you can't just go buy a new one, you have to get one of the same or similar generation as the tapes: an LTO-7 drive can't read a LTO-4 tape, for instance.
At least DVDs are a fixed format that hasn't changed in decades, and getting a drive to read them is easy (and BluRay drives can read them too).
DNA makes no sense for storage: it isn't even very good for storing our own genome, and needs complicated mechanisms to ensure integrity, and even then frequently fails, resulting in mutations (which is how evolution works).
What we need is glass-based holographic storage. There is some commercial work here that I think Microsoft is involved in, but it seems to not be moving very quickly.
This is great. I’ve been looking for more local multistage storage: with fast frequent access degrading to slow large capacity. In the future with large volumes I can store the text of the Internet for a personal archive.
there is no innovation here. they combined tape with SSD. What's new or even hard about that? How about we add NVME to tape? Is that innovation? Next you'll tell me they added a propeller to a jet plane and call it innovation. This is basic caching and that concept has been around for ages used with hard drives, CPUs, networking. https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/caching-writes-to-lto-tape... oh look, people talking about caching with ssd! what an innovation!
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach him to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. Ban fish and the man gets into farming and animal husbandry and doesn't need you anymore.
The analogy needs something about IP theft of automated fishing pole designs
This misses the point. If you gave all of the F-35 IP to India they would still be incapable of developing the indigenous industries required to build a 5th generation fighter in a similar amount of time.
I think that misses the point too. If China has such competent indigenous aerospace industries then they shouldn't be relying on foreign designs for their engines and aircraft. If everyone else can design a proper 5th gen aircraft, why can't China?
Part of China's overall strategy, since the theft of the Su-27 design, has been to exploit foreign concepts to give their military a modern-looking edge. But it's purely a paper tiger - China does not have the industry to even match the engine performance of USSR designs. Hundreds of their J-11 designated Su-27s fly with Russian engines and their current fleet almost entirely relies on potential engine overhauls to meet their minimum operational requirements. The PLA Air Force is an optimistic application of technologies that do not yet exist in the hope that one day it will achieve the desired tactical effect.
We can see the effects of this strategy already. China's J-35 has been reportedly very unstable during flight with avionics and engines only reaching basic functionality. Of course, there is no F-35B clone either, so they've really only implemented the least-strategic models with what sounds like a skin-deep reverse-engineering job. China stole the designs to look tough, and now they're hiding the prototypes before they embarrass them in action. You might as well have just given the designs to India at that point, at least they're honest about their reliance on Russian technology.
I think it's not year 2000 anymore. PLAAF has been on indigenous turbofan more performant than USSR ALs for years. They are no longer reliant on RU engine imports for new/modern platforms, unless for old hardware where it doesn't make sense to re-engine, i.e. the oldest blocks of J11... even J11 post block2 (2010s) have transitioned to domestic engines. The 300s+ of J16 that supercedes J11... domestic engines. Navalized J15 last to transition, but again, now on domestic engines. Areas where they're around parity (i.e. high bypass) they're still making USSR/RU derriviative designs indigenously... hence the actual point, these are engines built in PRC because PRC actually has COMPETENT domestic aero sector to build them - hand plans to India and most other countries including most advanced economies and they simply can't because they lack requisit industrial base.
There's zero credible news on J35s unless you go full retard on Indian or FLG defense writing. Who else can redesign a proper 5th gen except US and PRC. There's a reason USAF aggressor squad to mimick PRC 5th gen J20s uses actual F35s, while aggressor for RU 5th gen is F18s. And why would PLAAF they clone the strategic boondoggles that is F35Bs? STOVL F35B has crippled range for IndoPac theatre to the point where it's essentially irrelevant while mere existence has been largest source of fuckup for the entire F35 program due to common components requirement that dragged the other models down. There's a reason NGAD and other next gen programs are doubling down on range. Why supercarriers sticking with F18s while F35Bs are stuck on amphibs. The actual effects of PRC's successful indigenous aerospace strategy/procurement is throwing US 6GEN program into conniptions - NGAD isn't going back to drawing board after 10 years of development to have entire CONOPS reevaluated because of SU57. It's because PRC aerospace got very competent, very fast in last 15 years.
The STOVL version looks much cooler. The other countries just couldn't figure out how to build it without it ending up bulky like a harrier.
TBH I think F35 obese/fat/baluga Amy looks nice because it's bulky like harrier. But I also really dug the charm of slack jawed X32. Seeing stealth coatings on these fat birds is like watching goofy kids pull off sick fits.
Fat Amy.
> Who else can redesign a proper 5th gen except US and PRC.
We don't even know if China's jets are 5th gen. The J-20 is a joke compared to the F-22 despite having 20 of lead time since America's 5th gen debut. If the US is using F-35s to simulate dogfighting a Chinese dual-engine air superiority platform, it's a sign they don't take them entirely seriously. After all, the F-16 is technically a better dogfight aggressor in USAF simulations.
China is starting to see the fruits of their own aerospace investments, but they clearly haven't got parity even with the US's oldest 5th gen inventory. China is too cagey with J-35 information for a serious comparison to the F-35. The J-20 was laughed out of the room when it was announced it couldn't supercruise without engine overhauls, and it still struggles to hit Mach 2 with a combat load. The H20 hasn't even been formally unveiled yet, and it's doubtful it will reach feature parity with the B-2. The entire lineup is inherently questionable.
> And why would PLAAF they clone the strategic boondoggles that is F35Bs?
Uhh... Naval operations?
Look, you're entirely right about the gimped range and the G limits of the F-35B. But the US selected it because there are damning tactical implications from a stealth fighter that can VTOL and carry AMRAAMs. The dogfighting specs really aren't even that relevant if you can get the standard A2A compliment into the air fast enough to fight. The value an F-35 can provide on the deck of an amphib or destroyer is immense and unmatched by any adversary. Screw the smaller range, you're on a goddamn boat! China would absolutely make the F-35B... if they could.
> NGAD isn't going back to drawing board after 10 years of development to have entire CONOPS reevaluated because of SU57.
NGAD can take as long as it needs. There isn't credible competition to America's air superiority platforms and any PRC victory in the Pacific, now or in the forseeable future (next 5-10 years), would have to be won through attrition. China knows this, it's why their shipyards are at-capacity in anticipation of needing the materiel. Taiwan manufactures their own antishipping missiles and America has 50 years of stockpiled AGM-84s. A balls-to-the-wall engagement between both powers could result in a hundred sinked ships in one day. The Taiwan strait is small, and once the PRC goes mask-off they'll have to hide every part of their Navy they don't want destroyed.
I don't doubt that NGAD is taking the PLAAF into account, but I'm pretty sure they know that China's 5th gen jets struggle to maintain 4th generation operational capacity. America's foothold on 5th gen air combat is tenured and proven - China is clinging to a marketing bark over bite strategy that most people have rightfully ignored. If China was certain in their tactical capabilities then they would also copy the United State's strategy of limiting their aircraft inventory. The mass production is a tacit admission that China intends to destroy a lot of J-20s and J-35s.
And we don't even know if US jets are 5th gen. What recent official US documentation that dismiss J20 as not 5th gen (except PLA old classification system that -1 gen across board). Using 5th gen as aggressor to simulate 5th BECAUSE 5th gen isn't about kinematics (i.e. F16) - it's about sensors and other capabilities, why 4th gen gets stomped by 5th gen chillaxing from BVR. Why F35 fine with being more sluggish multirole vs F16.
It's well known PRC turbojet is not at parity with US, but it's also competitive - i.e. not many generations behind, and by all credible accounts have surpassed RU in recent years. The point is they went from having to import engines to having entire supply chain to build 100s of cores at scale, FULLY DOMESTICALLY within last 10 years. That's not just fruits, that's an orchard in terms of statusquo disruption.
>F35Bs
I don't think PLA wouldn't make SVTOL with gimped range if they could, because SVTOL trade for range morely optimized for IndoPac/PRC backyard. SVTOL was good compromise for marines wanting to keep VTOL and select F35 partners with amphib size carriers when program was conceived 30+ years ago, when range/operations was designed around NATO conflict where SVTOL was strategic using makeshift and RU was just across the horizon. That's made increasingly irrelevant now that longer range strikes are proliferating to the point where liability of gimped range means launch platforms (amphibs) can't even operate close enough to launch, which is extra but kick when gimping Bs also gimped A, Cs.
> competition to America's air superiority
The credible competition is the entire PLA concentrated in theatre to prevent US from establishing air superiority in the first place, so in that sense NGAD can take as long as needed because there likely isn't an NGAD CONAP that works againsts PLA, hence the program reset. I would say there isn't a credible way for US to establish/sustain air superiority because superior US aviation can't be sustained. But you're right about attrition, PRC fine with losing entire PLAN if it means US loses entire USN, since PRC has 300x+ ship building capacity to reconsitute faster post war, and global security architecture breaks when USN gone.
> they know that China's 5th gen jets struggle to maintain 4th generation
Again which reports suggest US/DoD thinks PRC struggle with 5th gen operating as 4th gen. What's being written suggest they know the opposite. Excessive amount of words reports have been written on PLA aviation in last 5 years... the opposite of "rightly ignored"... it's borderline fixation. I uppose to mass production of F35s is tacit admission that US is going to lose F35s. Or USAF regrets deprecating all the tooling for F22s when they realized need to for more 5th gen airframes.
>limiting their aircraft inventory
J20 for F22, J35 fo F35 in high/low 5th gen mix. So they are, in fact replicating US high/low mix. J20 production is only 100 / year, about F35 production. The parsimonious interpretation - maturing Chinese aerospace is at point to match US in production, they want 2500+ 5th gen fleet just like US. Short/medium term they're just trying to close the 200 vs 600 5th gen airframe gap. If anything it's tacit admission they're comfortable enough with their 5th gen efforts to mass produce. Or that procurement wise, US seems to be the one who is NOT certain of their 5th gen, holding on to F18s, and now F15EX to plug the low mix gap, while figuring out how to modernize high mix with NGAD.
> It's well known PRC turbojet is not at parity with US, but it's also competitive
Yeah, and I'm not trying to dunk on the value of mass-producing mediocre turbojets. The JF-17 is a masterclass in taking an okay engine and selling it in a package that makes it immensely more valuable. China's cruise missiles have come into a class of their own with a wide variety of cheap expendable engines to pick from; few others are as willing to export it with no questions asked. Making last-gen jets is a booming business.
That being said, you can't really write off the "-1" generation jets because a lot of them haven't been upgraded to anything else. There's certainly a lot of potential to get them into the sky with better engines later down the line, but quite literally that technology doesn't exist in many cases. The J-35 comes with two engines - count 'em, two.
> That's made increasingly irrelevant now that longer range strikes are proliferating to the point where liability of gimped range means launch platforms (amphibs) can't even operate close enough to launch
That's where naval aviation shines, though. The Taiwan strait is tiny - once China presses the red button it will be very easy to identify and attack both the primary airfields China relies on as well as any ships in port. Having a high number of amphibs operating in formation with a few Arleigh Burkes escorting a supercarrier puts extreme pressure on an already strained PLAA/PLAN. With China's investment in naval capacity it's surprising to see them put so much emphasis on a CATOBAR approach that presents such an easy target for adversaries. I think STOVL is highly underestimated in wartime, but we've yet to see a real engagement that tests it so I'll agree to disagree if you'd prefer.
> I uppose to mass production of F35s is tacit admission that US is going to lose F35s.
The US has export obligations, and they're pretty far behind on delivered F-35s by most accounts.
The interest in China's aviation capacity isn't really an indictment of their superiority either. It's mostly reciprocal at this point - Chinese journals had obsessed over American capabilities for the past 2 decades, so now America wants to see what they've learned. In some places they've learned a lot - in other places they're making plainly inflated claims.
> US seems to be the one who is NOT certain of their 5th gen, [...] while figuring out how to modernize high mix with NGAD.
And I don't think that's a bad spot to be in. The F-22 has been on it's way out for some time now - the writing was on the walls if you look at the financials. The F-35 had a troubled development but it's rollout hasn't been markedly worse any other stealth aircraft. F/A-18s and F-15s are going to continue to stick around as missile trucks, but they too will be replaced, maybe even the B-21 if it's AESA radar is good enough.
At the end of the day, you gotta look at it like this; China is overpromising and underdelivering on a relatively constant basis. They did good, and their game of catch-up has yielded them competent advancements and even marketable tech for export. America still did 5th gen better, albeit at extreme expense, and designed their own jets from scratch to boot. If you are afraid of China's plainly fear-coded marketing lifted straight out of Soviet strategy, you're probably also the sort of person that stands up and claps to the TV when Tim Cook says "best iPhone yet" every year.
>two engines
So does F18, F15... NGAD renders as well. Current theories on NGAD cost cutting design would fall back to 1 engine, because 1 engine is compromise, especially for naval aviation that prefers redundancy. Hence F35B stovl requirements fucking up rest of models due to commonality requirements that limited F35s to single engine, which is why design driving next gen of development moving towards more purpose built airframes for each service requirements... and for 6gen, essentially every 6gen program currently is presumably going to be, from prototypes to renders, 2 engines, kf21, TF Kaan, Tempest/GCAP, FCAS... everyone is reverting back to 2 engines. Count'em, two.
Not to writing off 1 engine. US aero is sufficiently advanced/reliable/optmitized to get away with 1 engine for some fighters, and koodoos for that. But there's also benefits to 2 engines (kinematically, i.e. theres things superhornets are much better optmized for that F35s are not). Having to run 2 engines because 1 engine performance bad would be valid cope if not for the fact that 2 engines also have advantages and and disadvantages can be mitigated through industrial base... i.e. if you can churn out tons of cores to equip 1000s of twin engine fighters, it's not an issue and maybe net benefit. Especially during war when airframes would get shot before components reach end of life. 4th gen fighters are either going to get replaced or shot down, J11s running old RU engines that's PIA to maintain matters less in that context.
>naval aviation shines
I think that's where naval aviation becomes increasingly irrelevant. When IRBMs pushes A2D2 amphibs from operating useful distances. Wargames trying to interdict in TW scenario has CSHs operating from outside 2IC, with tanking in between for the hope you can get carrier air wings in range while keeping carrier at safeish distances (where PLA can "only" deliver 100s of AsHMs instead of 1000s). That bubble is going to get further, meanwhile amphibs+stovl are stuck in bubble where they can't operate permissively, or at at all without being hit by AShMs in 30 minutes. Hence war games that presumes US have chance _require_ distributed and hardened 1IC basing (mainly AGILE in JP). The expectation in planning/procurement (i.e. state of US ship building) for naval aviation is low relative to shelthering air frames under a shit load of concrete on land, even if land closer. TLDR is in TW scenario where STVOL mattered, PRC has already lost, because F35Bs mattering means US operating completely right next to PRC or with uncontested tanking, i.e. not just air supremacy, but utterly crippling PLA mainland fires.
I also don't think PRC is putting so much emphasis on catobar or even carrier OPs in general. PLAN carrier procurement is glacial relative to industrial capacity. 2.5 carriers in 15 years is indicator of being profoundly not serious about carriers, versus PLAN churning out subsurface even when their subs were shit. And now by accounts PLAN 1gen behind US in SSN, and they're building out shipyards that can pump 4-6 SSNs per year. They're serious about subs.
>bad spot to be in
Nor is it a "good" spot to be in. Rejiggering air composition to backstop with 4th gens for roles planners wanted to task with 5th gens because 5th gen and now 6th gen programs haven't delivered to expectations is no thte spot US planners wanted or anticipated to be in.
>interest in China's aviation / China is overpromising and underdelivering on a relatively constant basis / inflated claims
What inflated claims? That PRC can in fact build 5th gen fighters, like DoD/officials recognize? What credible reporting suggest PLA 5th gen performs like 4th gen... that J35 has basic functionality? There was like one report from early 2010s abotu J35/FC31 prototype experiencing difficulties during initial test, i.e. on par with F35 can't fly in lightening, have serious avionic issues 10+ years ago. But no one pretends F35 isn't 5th gen because of intial (and ongoing) teething issues. I did not suggest PRC aviation superiority, but pointing out none of official/credible writngs suggest PLA is making inflated claims... because anyone who watches PLA is frustrated by just how little PLA make claims. At the end of the day, PLA is notoriously opaque, if anything the pattern is rarely over promise anything and deliver out of the blue, i.e. systems get acquired and revealed much later than western MIC reporting. Past 10 years of PLA engine development are countless articles of them talking about technical difficulties and delays and only recently celebrating indigenous self sufficiency / passing RU aerospace. Versus the shitshow that is F35 program, where most popular discourse is parrots lockheed marketing materials vs dod reporting. Or unending wank over NGAD even months before program explodes. If there's anything to be afraid of, it's how LITTLE PRC markets, meanwhile analysts have to count tail numbers from social media photos or airframes from satellites to get actual sense of PLAAF buildup.
Soviet engines were always bad with low hours between overhaul. They didn't think reliability was important if it was just going to be lost in the first hours of WW3.
"Teach a man to fish, he eats for a lifetime. Allow the man to steal your F-35 documents and you must communicate that teaching time is over."
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I always don’t understand this argument? By this logic, should every companies publicise their trade secrets and redact all the copyright and patents to maintain a dominant market position?
That would be a reasonable strategy. Businesses built on trade secrets are quite workable but strategically weak because if the secret gets rediscovered they have a real problem. It is better to use a strategy of real advantages. And there are some really interesting case studies here the big tech companies actually rely from an environment where open source is big.
The real issue with IP is that it is an artificial government monopoly and largely unjustified. As we see in China, if you want to grow at maximum speed it makes more sense to operate without respect for IP law because it is an anchor. We saw something similar in the US where it was the in-practice failure of IP law to be executed that allowed the software ecosystem to thrive. Banning people from implementing good ideas has devastating economic consequences.
You're missing a few components here: time and originator investment.
No advantage, resources aside, is permanently durable. Most are instead temporary advantages -- advantages when you have a technology but your peers do not. IP enforcement is one tool to maintain that window of advantage.
China, like US before it, grew at maximum speed when it was reverse engineering already discovered technologies and applying them.
Like the US, it has already begun to pivot towards IP-enforcement, as it begins to originate novel technologies. To do otherwise is to pretend that copying competitors' discoveries and making them yourself cost the same -- and it very much doesn't.
> Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach him to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. Ban fish and the man gets into farming and animal husbandry and doesn't need you anymore.
Eh, you're misusing the saying in an inappropriate way. It's about fostering self-sufficiency in people you want to help. It's not really applicable to rivals and enemies.
In this case, the hubris of the 1990s cause the US to get into this relationship with China, and now that's going to have to unwind somehow (and doing that in a 5-D chess way is unrealistic). And anyway, it's not like China's goal was to remain dependent on Western tech forever, it's plan is to become self-sufficient on its own terms on its own timetable, and the best the US can hope to achieve is cause some disruption and mess that timetable up.
Up to 2 minutes seek time for cold data. Very niche.
It’s niche enough to be a major industry. Cold storage at extreme scales for very low cost is higher value than it appears - there’s a lot of data that isn’t worth very much individually but has extremely high value if it’s ever needed - but you can’t know ahead of time which data that is. That’s all about ultra low price per gb storage that’s high durable.
This idea adds a fast SSD cache to a slow access bulk archive.
Obviously that cache can massively accelerate repeated access to the same data, and reduce tape wear and mechanical wear and energy usage.
But I think the critical issue is where you want the cache to be. Because end point devices already have local cache.
So this product only seems to have a big advantage on applications where you expect many unique users to access the same archive data for the first time, and within a short period of time before it expires from the tape drive’s SSD cache.
This is why I think it’s a small niche. Maybe too small to be worthwhile.
Edit: it also has the disadvantage that the first few devices to try to access the data would have a huge delay for a minute or more while the data is located on the tape. It’s also vulnerable to DDOS by attackers requesting random cold data, to fill the SSD.
Got me thinking if anyone tried something ala torrents for utilizing client-side caches to lighten the load on the server.
If the alternative is slow storage, getting it from a different client on the LAN might be win.
Seems like a great way to:
- Archive for the film industry. 2 minutes to retrieve an archived take is a good compromise of cost and time.
- Archive for the recording industry. 2 minutes to recover the "master tapes" when you remaster for the umpteenth time is a good compromise of cost and time.
- The product I work on has requirements to archive data for a year / 10 years / 20 years and then generate a report. A 2 minute delay is perfectly acceptable.
My workplace archived old builds of our product. It’s very rare that we need them, but we do need them occasionally. We’d happily take 1 hour latency to be able to cheaply store more of them.
Almost literally designed for you: https://aws.amazon.com/s3/storage-classes/glacier/
It is, and google and microsoft have similar.
But whether it's the best option is a big maybe.
Glacier is great at smaller scales, or to make things simple. (Well, great excluding the egress prices.)
But by the time your data won't fit on a large NAS (>200TB), a $5000 tape drive and a bunch of $5/TB tapes are cheaper than glacier.
That is not niche at all. Pretty much any gov't, corp, etc that needs long term achives could do with faster access. 2 min is light speed since it's low(er) cost/decade/gb
If you want to build something like youtube, you could store the data from a start of a video, and data defining a slower resolution stream, and more popular videos on the lower latency parts of tapes in your storage arrays, and while the video plays you could go get the rest from the higher latency places.
You could also predict What is the next video the user will want.
Also, the 2 minute seek time is from one end of the tape to the other. But you could also move accross tracks, vertically so that gives another route for short seek times for some of your data.
So it might be possible to build something with a reasonable performance.
Sounds like minute long ads are inevitable and unskippable while the system fetches the video file.
They'd probably have an easier time getting people to watch ads if they had a message: "please enjoy this message from our sponsor while we wait for your video to be retrieved from the offline archives".
Depends on price. If it was good enough I'd use it for backups.
It has to cost more than tape alone with the flash media sitting in front of it.
That's true, but this is considerably more convenient than traditional tape. Tape as is requires specialty equipment and careful handling, if I understand the above product proposition correctly, it's just plug and play. Right now, only an enthusiast would use tape in their home setup, with this approach, anyone could use it for their backup server or w/e.
Meanwhile, some guide online (probably AI crafted), mixes up swap space and cold storage space. A new swap of death.
But, "never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of hard drives".
The intriguing use case (thinking as a consumer) is ~2tb "hot", and effectively treating the remainder tape as kindof "append-only/WAL" (and: e.g. incremental backups).
I have been randomly ripping my DVDs, mostly keeping the transcoded MP4s, but hesitant to delete the ISO's because they require physical handling and _time_ to re-rip.
If it's ~2min to seek to an 8gb ISO, that's potentially faster than re-downloading it from somewhere offsite, and would match my hypothetical use cases really well.
Keeping a local ~2tb drive backed up to a ~4tb+40tb "ssd-tape-hard-drive" is probably cheaper than most long-term cloud stuff (backblaze ~$6/tb/mo!!, glacier ~$4/tb/mo, but with lots of asterisks on retrieval time), and simpler than messing around with a NAS.
Glad I don't truly have these problems!
China will sell this to you as a service
I see lot of reasonable use cases, say something like Internet Archive or library in general. Keep the frequented stuff in more hot cache and then rest of the stuff in colder storage. Without having to actually think about the process.
Similar could be some new media production company. Archive B-roll or parts of older videos and then have the stuff you use very common available much faster.
That's plenty quick enough for the Windows Start button.
Zing!
This could be easily improved by keeping track of what's on the tape where in part of the SSD, like a length-based filesystem. Then it is just a matter of seeking to that length of tape and finding the actual start of the data. You could take the seek time for cold data to just a couple dozen seconds.
Well yeah, it’s tape storage.
I'm not sure why people still need tape storage or hybrid SSD and tape storage, is it because of banking financial transactions recording requirements since the SSD storage now has similar or better storage capacity?
The reported storage size for the hybrid MED is 72TB and Micron now has 60 TB for single SSD drive [1].
Huawei has even higher storage capacity with reported 128 TB in a single SSD drive [2].
[1] Micron launches 60TB PCIe gen5 SSD with 12GB/s read speeds:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42122434
[2] Huawei unveils its OceanStor A800 AI-specific storage solution; announces 128TB high-capacity SSD:
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/huawei-unveils-it...
Size per dingus is somewhat irrelevant to the use case: what's it matter if you buy 10 things that take up a rack or 20 things that take up a rack - how much did it cost to store all of your data at the speed you needed? Modern tape still has extremely good $/TB. If you have a LOT (and I don't just mean a fews 100s of TB) of data you need to keep but don't need to be able to access all of it constantly then tape can still save you a metric boatload of money on TCO vs SSD or HDD.
Dual tier systems are for when a small amount of that data may be hot at any given time (like you say, financial often has a lot of active data in a pool of tons of inactive data they can't throw out. Medical is another example). Rather than manual manage this you just run a 2 tier system that automatically bumps things in and out of high $$$, high performance storage banks to low $, high capacity storage banks transparently.
Is it like a hybrid drive, where there's no special hardware, just a controller trying to cache better than the host device would?
But why use tape storage in this day and age?
Cheap and very very reliable archival storage (essentially no failure modes other than the magnetic media itself), weight and volume wise pretty much still the best density you can get 18TB (up to 45 with compression) in a small 200g package is hard to beat when you need to move peta bytes around.
Also tape is much cheaper to produce than platters especially at large volumes.
How does such tape compare to 2" and 1/2" analogue reel to reel tape, in terms of production costs?
A new reel of Ampex 2" tape is $375.00 currently: https://vintageking.com/atr-magnetics-studio-master-tape-blu...
I don’t know but over the counter direct purchase single unit LTO 9 tapes are about £70-80 each in the UK for 18TB, in large volumes they are much cheaper, I’ve seen quotes in the £30 per tape and that wasn’t at a cloud provider or even massive enterprise scale or anywhere close to that.
In the 1980s or 90s, Jim Gray predicted that in the far future memory hierarchy would be reduced to main memory + tape.
Not sure that prediction holds up (although streaming dbs in the cloud seem awfully "tape-like" to me?), but I did attempt to quickly redo his "5 minute rule" calculations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42125052
If I did the math right, there's no point to swap or paging anymore, as the break-even point I got was evict after 1 week* (instead of 5 min) for random access patterns, and evict after 5 hours for sequential access patterns.
These days maybe those breakeven calculations would be more useful for deciding how long to keep something in a register and when it'd be better to recalculate or spill to main memory?
* of course, if you keep everything in main memory and forget nothing, we're close to what in 1998 was one of McCarthy's pipe dreams: Elephant2000 http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/elephant/elephant.html ; I guess if I were to attempt something like Elephant2038, it'd wind up looking like a bunch of past-oriented LTL formulae?
(the "speech acts" were probably Winograd's influence?)
Not to needlessly alleviate your suffering, but what is LTL?
Of course, these Nobel Bauble driven days, “quantum memories” sound like little more than search engine bawdlerised AdWords..
Linear Temporal Logic: https://www.cs.colostate.edu/~france/CS614/Slides/Ch5-Summar...
(for Xφ, I prefer to define it as relative to a given frame: φ holds the next time any of the frame variables change, which allows both continuous<->discrete translation and for Lamport's stuttering [to allow abstraction!])
Next up: GC via creation and annihilation operators? (in my algebraic view of informatics, one is often either structuring by cleaving two parts to make a whole, or destructuring by cleaving a whole into two parts)
EDIT: and by past-oriented I mean using "was ever" for "eventually" and in the past for "globally", as well as "since" for "until". rotate t by i^2. Eg
says the local buffer differs from the cloud if there was ever an edit since a save or load.EDIT 2: ...and I'm pretty sure I can autogenerate code that turns these kinds of def'ns into an imperative event-driven state machine; one can of course come up in theory with formulae that require an arbitrarily complex implementation, but I think in practice most def'ns (especially if we provide backpressure by signalling the complexity of the resulting imp) would be satisfied with simple ones.
There are no downsides to keeping off-cloud physical backup sets of most critical data in a firesafe or two (and still needed for SOC 2 compliance I understand)
> Aug 23: CloudNordic said: “The attackers succeeded in encrypting all servers’ disks, as well as on the primary and secondary backup system, whereby all machines crashed and we lost access to all data.”
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."
For big data transfers, this still holds true.
I think makes perfect sense for archiving. I keep hearing tapes last 30 years, while in the same room temperature SSDs last a few years. Just wish I could find a solid source for it!
A worn-out SSD is supposed to be able to preserve its data for one year for consumer SSDs or three months for enterprise SSDs (not at the same temperature). That's the industry-standard threshold of data retention used to determine how "worn out" is considered end-of-life. A SSD that hasn't burned through its entire write endurance will have considerably longer data retention.
We're not talking about write endurance though? From what I've read, unpowered SSDs only hold the data for a year or two, regardless of the age of the drive.
> From what I've read, unpowered SSDs only hold the data for a year or two, regardless of the age of the drive.
You've probably been reading bad sources. There is a very real relationship between the number of P/E cycles that a piece of flash memory has been through and the unpowered data retention it can provide. Lots of publications and even more random forum posts repeat statements about SSD data retention without including the caveat that the numbers apply specifically to worn-out drives. Brand new flash memory can easily have unpowered data retention in excess of a decade.
If you're reading a source that claims SSD unpowered data retention is only a year, and that source does not qualify that with a statement about the prior condition of the drive, you should assume that you're reading another misinterpretation of the JEDEC standards.
You can buy LTO tapes from Amazon and office suppliers easily.
The drives and the software are the problem.
Drives are very expensive and there isn’t much non enterprise software to manage tape backups.
Enterprise software is expensive and you won’t likely be even able to buy it and since cloud storage and NAS became commoditized all the backup software that targeted small businesses pretty much either died off or went cloud backup only.
Tape has a tremendous density advantage over disks. Think about how much area a tape occupies if you were to completely unroll it, and compare that to a disk platter. The flip side is access times are extremely long compared to disks, but for the usual application of backup and recovery that doesn't matter much. In this case they're pairing the tape with faster non-volatile storage so writes at least will be very quick (reads not so much, 2 minute access time!)
The 2min number is likely an average over a large volume of drives.
An LTO 9 tape has over a kilometer(!) of tape in it.
You can spool the tape only so fast without risking damage to either the tape itself or the cartridge so if your file is at the end of the tape you’ll be waiting for a while.
It's a single tape. Even without any kind of fast forward, the write speed of LTO-9 is 6 meters per second. It takes three minutes to go completely end to end.
Backups or satellite imagery is my guess.
Nice idea to integrate all the moving parts in the same cartridge. Probably the economics are favorable now a days. If the components for tape drives are cheap it makes sense to put them in the cartridge and skip all the moving parts in the robot. The question is if the money can be recouped on maintenance saving? Tape robots are quite reliable but comes paired with an expansive support contract to ensure it’s running 24/7. Or maybe the purported cost saving is in the initial procurement? The LTO stuff has always been somewhat pricey.
Has it ever been revealed what Amazon is using to back Glacier. I had heard a lot of speculation including some sort of custom optical disk. Anyone know?
China is a country of over 1 billion people. It has advanced and surpassed many Western countries in the span of just 40 years. Trying to put a leash on them with sanctions is futile, hostile, and will only increase their determination. We should be trying to find common ground and working with them instead of fabricating another boogeyman for no reason.
+500 social credits
Indeed, why not find common ground with a totalitarian regime that conducts genocides and violently suppresses democracy and dissent
take it from an old man that was born in eastern europe in another totalitarian regime, I've seen it in practice, I've seen the horrors behind closed doors: appeasement never works and only prolongs the suffering of the people.
I hate to make a whataboutism argument, but the US is no angel either.
Okay, so? Countries around China need to deal with China's aggression all the time. That isn't resolved by pointing out that the US sucks too.
That's like saying someone having 2 beers a week, is the same as an alcoholic.
> appeasement never works
lmaoo for everything that works they wouldn't be called appeasement, just treaty. Is Paris Peace Accords an appeasement that doesn't work? It sealed the demise of the non-communist South Vietnam, but no one cared about South Vietnam today aside of fringe Vietnamese in California.
>We should be trying to find common ground and working with them
Why should we, after what they did to the rights and freedoms of the people of Hong Kong?
Look at China's neighbors. I'm sure the solution to their conflicts with China is "finding common ground and working with them". Would you have told Ukraine the same thing about Russia before Russia invaded? Hell, do you say it now?
No, I have always been strongly on Ukraine's side. The war began because diplomacy failed. We do not want the same to happen with Taiwan - again, we should be trying to find common ground and deescalate the situation. Sanctions are a band aid and escalate, and they only work for so long.
and by deescalation, you mean give China and Russia anything they want
I didn't say that, or imply that, and it would make no sense for that to be my stance given that I said I support Ukraine. At least put some thought in before you hit reply.
The war started because Putin wanted it to start. There’s no other hidden reason.
Unironically yes since China wont move geographically from its position for million of years, US can be distracted by something else somewhere and pivoted from Asia, but China wont. It stays there.
I like your optimism but this ship sailed a long time ago.
If you are outside the US and China it is hard not to empathize with the Chinese annoyance with the do-as-we-say-not-as-we-do “rules based order”, and deciding to play the exact game on the US that the US has played with everyone else.
Reminds me of how some manufacturers tried to combine a small SSD with a large HDD the same way in the early 2010s.
Haha, Apple was still selling iMacs equipped with Fusion Drives in 2021. Really cool tech for the time, but should've stayed in the 2010s
I did realise those were still being sold only a few years ago.
The overall concept still existing at filesystem level such as ZFS’ L2ARC, although this is a RAM heavy feature.
ELI5: I’ve lost track of tape storage technologies. When does it make sense to use tape backup at home? Most people rely on cloud services or external hard drives for backing up large files like family photos and videos. But is there a point—like a certain amount of data—where it becomes convenient to use tape instead?
On the surface, this might seem like a simple question, but let me elaborate with an example: think about storing unavailable movies on high-quality 2K/4K/8K content. Would tape backup be a good fit for this kind of use at home?
The main problem with tape storage at small scales (including home use) has always been that tape drives are relatively expensive (several thousand dollars new), and buying just one makes it a single point of failure for your backup system. If your data set can fit on one or two dozen hard drives, then hard drives are the cheaper option (unless you keep them powered up and spinning 24/7).
> When does it make sense to use tape backup at home?
Never. Tape only makes sense for true cold storage-ie. business-critical backups that are only going to be read back in case of emergency, where a couple days to retrieve the data is an acceptable compromise. "Movies I don't watch very often" are not 'cold' enough- it's just not worth the hassle of switching tapes and maintaining the entirely different infrastructure for even finding the right tape and reading the data. And while the price of the media is attractive, even second hand drives are prohibitively expensive and packed with moving parts to break down. If you really have a use case for offline backups at home BD-R is much more accessible (and I did look into this recently for the same use-case; unfortunately optical disk robots are still out of the reach of enthusiasts too. Could be a cool DIY project though...)
The tape market is highly price-fixed and innovation-restricted. Intel has more or less of a total monopoly in this space. It's essentially LTO or go home. Your one and only option is enterprise grade hardware at enterprise prices. Even on eBay, prices are well beyond what I'd consider consumer-accessible. Your best bet is to piece together a fiber channel system and hope you get lucky on a cheap used drive.
IBM is wholly uninterested in selling tape to consumers, so you aren't going to have a good time trying to use it anyway.
>The tape market is highly price-fixed and innovation-restricted. Intel has more or less of a total monopoly in this space.
Huh? How so? Intel doesn't make tape drives, and never has. IIRC, there are 4 companies making tape drives, including Quantum and HPE.
Throughout my career, folks have asked me to look at tape for a wide range of uses, and even after investing a bunch of time and money, my conclusion is: few users need tape. For the vast majority of users, hard drives represent the pinnacle of tradeoffs in capacity, performance, and long-term reliability.
tape storage would be perfect for storing movies. There is not much random access and it's cheap. Also need it to last 100 years would be a good selling point. DVDs work but they do fail over time. Still waiting for that holographic or DNA storage.
If you need to store the entire Netflix catalog, then yes, tape would be the way to go here. If you're just storing your own personal collection, then definitely not. It's much cheaper to just buy or build a NAS with some large HDDs and store your entire library there, plus you can have immediate access to it any time with Jellyfin or Plex. The problem with tapes is that the tapes themselves aren't that cheap, and the drives are prohibitively expensive and require an HBA card (even more money). On top of that, enterprise software for tape management is horrifically expensive (and you probably can't buy it anyway as an individual), or you have to manage them manually at the command line with `tar > /dev/tape`. Even worse, if your tape drive dies (it is a complex mechanical item with lots of moving parts after all), then to read your tape library, you can't just go buy a new one, you have to get one of the same or similar generation as the tapes: an LTO-7 drive can't read a LTO-4 tape, for instance.
At least DVDs are a fixed format that hasn't changed in decades, and getting a drive to read them is easy (and BluRay drives can read them too).
DNA makes no sense for storage: it isn't even very good for storing our own genome, and needs complicated mechanisms to ensure integrity, and even then frequently fails, resulting in mutations (which is how evolution works).
What we need is glass-based holographic storage. There is some commercial work here that I think Microsoft is involved in, but it seems to not be moving very quickly.
This is great. I’ve been looking for more local multistage storage: with fast frequent access degrading to slow large capacity. In the future with large volumes I can store the text of the Internet for a personal archive.
How are you squeezing the market when your stats say 2Ms(minutes) seek time. If to becomes popular WD can easily copy that tech.
When Chinese implements an existing feature: stealing. When WD implements an existing feature: innovation
The parent commenter never used or even implied “stealing” nor “innovation” anywhere in their comment. I dunno where you got your strawman from.
I’m commenting on the general attitude the west has toward Chinese tech. But I cannot delete that comment now.
there is no innovation here. they combined tape with SSD. What's new or even hard about that? How about we add NVME to tape? Is that innovation? Next you'll tell me they added a propeller to a jet plane and call it innovation. This is basic caching and that concept has been around for ages used with hard drives, CPUs, networking. https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/caching-writes-to-lto-tape... oh look, people talking about caching with ssd! what an innovation!
I like how this is forcing china to actually innovate in the semis area instead of a tech lag. It’s a good thing
Chinese manufactured SSDs all use YMTC NAND and have serious problem with data retention. https://goughlui.com/2023/10/10/psa-ssds-with-ymtc-flash-pro...
Tape might be a bodge to make product usable in enterprise.