What media for the Petabyte?
(March 1997) PDM has invited manufacturers of high density media (HDM) to supply information from which we have compiled the following analysis of capacity and cost. Current E&P favourite, IBM s Magstar, is also the most expensive media on the market As seismic surveys acquire more and more data at an ever increasing rate, the conventional technologies for data recording have been showing the strain over the last few years and recently the debate has been hotting up for as to the probable replacement for the 3480/3490 cartridges of the ’80s. A modern seismic survey can generate around 2 Terabytes of data. Written to the last generation industry standard 3480 cartridge with 200 MB capacity, this survey would take up 10,000 tapes. Double that for dual recording and you can see that tape handling is starting to become a serious problem. Some history The race for a replacement has been taking place over quite a time span, and solutions have been cropping up from a variety of sources. First
