On 29/04/2014 18:56, Dave Plowman (News) wrote:
In article id,
Jeremy Nicoll - news posts
wrote:
The Natural Philosopher wrote:

Tape is awful. Get over it. Just because with a huge amount of
calibration and understanding by some really good sound engineers and
design engineers it was good ENOUGH doesn't make it great. Just.
Barely. Good. ENOUGH.

I wish people here didn't assume that tape means analogue. There were
(even if they don't exist now) quite a few digital tape systems.

Trouble is you don't have one of the major advantages of a digital system
- random access. Having to spool up and down a tape to find something was
a real PITA. And they usually could only be copied in real time.

I was moderately impressed with how LTO handles this. Lots of linear
tracks (2716 in LTO6 according to Wikipedia), but only writing a few at
once (16 for LTO6) - though the write bandwidth is still really pretty
high (160MB/s uncompressed, ie more than Gb).

It writes forward, back, forward, back, etc for lots of passes. The
advantage being that it doesn't take nearly as much winding to get to
where your data is - a tape which takes over 4 hours to fill still has
an access time of under a minute.