An April 4 US DOGE social post announced that “The USGSA IT team just saved $1M per year by converting 14,000 magnetic tapes (70 year old technology for information storage) to permanent modern digital records.“
While this social media post doesn’t define the technology used to create permanent modern digital records, it may be useful to discuss what digital storage technologies are currently being used for permanent digital storage and what are common practices for storing data in large enterprises and data centers.
My colleague, Jim Handy, who co-authors a report on emerging non-volatile memory with me, created a useful representation of a hierarchy of digital storage and memory technology, shown below. This chart plots memory and storage technology performance as bandwidth, or MB/s, and the price of storage, as $/GB on a log/log plot.
L1, L2 and L3 are the fast volatile cache memories in computer processors that store data currently in process with DRAM providing somewhat slower system memory that supports these caches. NAND flash is a non-volatile memory that is increasingly used for primary storage of data that is frequently accessed by DRAM. Hard disk drives are somewhat slower that SSDs using NAND flash memory and are used for secondary storage of data, that needs to be generally available, but doesn’t require the higher performance of primary storage.
Magnetic tape technology uses magnetic recording technology that is similar to that in HDDs but access times for data are longer and thus magnetic tape is used for very infrequently accessed data and archiving. Note that the cost of digital storage in $/GB increases as the performance increases.
Actual storage systems used in enterprises and data centers, like the GSA, typically uses a combination of these various memory and storage technologies to get the maximum trade-off between performance and cost for the overall storage and memory system. Also, all of these memory and storage technologies are undergoing continuous development that decreases the cost of storage over time, increases the performance or both.
Magnetic tape is typically used for archived data because it has a low storage cost, the latest generation LTO-9 magnetic tapes, the most popular tape format, currently sell for about $90 for 18TB native capacity which have even higher storage capacity if compression is used. That comes out to about $5/TB for native capacity costs, much lower than HDDs and SSDs. Future generations of LTO tape will provide even cheaper digital storage as shown by the LTO roadmap below.
There are other archive storage technologies available, such as optical storage. Optical disc archives are available on the market, but it is not clear that conventional optical storage libraries could provide a significant cost savings compared to modern magnetic tape technology.
There are currently several optical storage startup companies that area targeting to provide archive storage alternatives, but these are not available in production yet. There are also companies working on storing archived data on DNA, but there are no commercial archive systems using synthetic DNA storage available today.
So, it is not at all clear how DOGE can save $1M per year by replacing 14,000 digital magnetic tapes, unless perhaps, what they meant was that they would consolidate data on older magnetic tapes to more modern higher capacity tapes so fewer tapes would be needed to store the data. Also, doing data migration to more modern media is generally a good idea as older media will degrade over time and the recording format could become obsolete and difficult to migrate.
It may also be that what they have in mind is to move data from on-site tape storage to remote storage, either physical storage or to move it to a remote data center, e.g. the cloud. But deep archives in the cloud are generally more expensive over the long term and will likely be on magnetic tape as well.
DOGE says they will save $1M per year at the US GSA by converting from magnetic tape to some other permanent storage. It is not clear how they will do this unless they are converting to more modern magnetic tape.
