Welcome!
If you are reading this page, you may have recently purchased an authentic CERN data tape from the CERN shop. All the proceeds from your purchase go to the CERN & Society Foundation, supporting different projects across Education & Outreach, Innovation & Knowledge Exchange, and Culture & Creativity.
Thank you very much for your contribution.
So, about your tape …
Did you know that?
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CERN manages the largest archive of scientific data in the high-energy physics domain and that it is constantly increasing.
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The energy consumption of tape storage is negligible compared to disk technology consumption.
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The tapes are between one to three orders of magnitude more reliable than the most reliable disk drives.
For these reasons and more, CERN is using magnetic tapes for long-term data preservation.
This technology is constantly evolving, and tape density is increasing on a steady basis. CERN replaces obsolete tape cartridges when it is commercially viable to migrate the data to new generation tapes that can store more data within the same plastic enclosure.
On a regular basis, every four or five years, the archived data is hence migrated from legacy cartridges and formats to higher density ones. This time-consuming process enables CERN to alleviate the need to purchase new tape libraries, keeping our data centre footprint similar despite significant increase in the data rate.
Migrating archived data (successfully) also ensures the data is still readable and therefore contributes to data preservation for future generations.
The last migration took place during 2022. It freed many tape cartridge slots by migrating data stored on 7-terabyte cartridges onto 18-terabyte ones.
The tape contains 1.6 Terabytes of data, including sample data from a Higgs Boson event and matter-antimatter asymmetry!
Unless you have a IBM TS1140 tape drive, it will be difficult, but you can view some thousands of collision data on CERN Open Data Portal.
The tapes are now for sale at the CERN Gift Shop, with a contribution of 10 CHF supporting CERN & Society projects. So, you can bring home an authentic LHC data souvenir and support a good cause, all in one go!
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