Seems kinda odd to mention uber expensive flash when talking about, cheaper than spinning disk, tape.

For the price of a 1TB SSD I can get you a 12TB/30TB Tape, easily between 10 or 30 times as much storage.

And as a bonus, while a SSD is only guaranteed to retain data without power for a year, tapes are designed for decades of cold storage.

Additionally, you could put up to 2x4x9 (HxWxD) tapes in there, at max capacity that is about 864TB/2.16PB

The only downside is you need another 1U to read the tapes, though the rest is automatic if you have a robotic tape library.

Well my point was not to show flash as superior but to point out the development in that area... every use-case has reason be it flash or Magnetic... author choose to paint Magnetic as better alternative to Flash (in capacity dimension), which is obviously can not be true for all the use-cases... (same for flash) my comment it to high-light that fact...

> author choose to paint Magnetic as better alternative to Flash (in capacity dimension)

I'm having trouble finding where in the article that occurred.

To me, it seemed to ignore flash/SSD, as the principle premise was that tape survives due to its low cost (at scale), so only the highest-density HDDs were mentioned.

But for how many years is unpowered data integrity guaranteed for modern enterprise flash storage? Magnetic media excels at archival. In fact, plain old paper does, too, provided it's stored properly. I bring this up only because storage doesn't necessarily require on-demand retrieval, and so flash storage may not be much use in those cases.

Dunno, had a room with 120 tapes and 100 spinning disks or so. The room hit 110F or so during an AC failure. 120 tapes died, zero disks. Actually I tried only 10 or so, before giving up. Tapes do seem much more sensitive, the storage temperature (non-operating) was the same as the operating temp of the disks.

Don't tapes have issues with print through and adhesion if not regularly used? I seem to recall best practices including something like annual seek to the end and seek to the beginning. Seems pretty similar to spinning disks.

I'm less sure of flash drives on a shelf.

This seems to indicate that these tapes are safe up to 120c for short periods of time. But that they should be archived at no more than 77.

https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/en/STCMML8/com.i...

Flash drives guarantee data integrity for up to a year (JEDEC), so you'd have to spin them up and read data, though I'm unsure if this is sufficient on flash.