A step towards infinite storage? (WHY2025)

This talk will take you into a journey leading to the retrofit of a robotic tape library to enable it to accomodate hard drives in addition to the original media, from the reasons we did it to all the obstacles that needed to be overcome and how we did all that, pushing a little further the physical limits that make data storage increasingly problematic in a world where over 200TB is generated every second and must sometimes be retained for years (and possibly more). Every year, humanity generates at least 250 Exabytes of data, so storage becomes increasingly problematic because this accumulates and at least part of it must be stored and made accessible for extended periods ; however, not all of that data is being accessed simultaneously. Moreover, the Internet is not well suited for the transfer of large datasets and quite often it is preferable to move physical media. In this talk we will dive into some physical limits related to this particular problem, and how we have pushed them a little further by retrofitting a large tape library so that it can accommodate hard drives in addition to magnetic tapes. This task involved reverse-engineering the drive train, designing new electronics to replace the proprietary and monolithic hardware by something more manageable, coming up with a plan to build a docking station that can be handled by the robot and withstand millions of insertion cycles and that is also end-user-friendly while keeping it as affordable as possible. We will dive into the limitations of the various tools at our disposal and how we worked around them to achieve our goal, while drawing a picture of all the skills and technologies involved and how this can be useful for you. Licensed to the public under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ about this event: https://program.why2025.org/why2025/talk/7X9NJP/