Musk's DOGE muzzled on X over tape storage baloney

70 years old, yes. Obsolete? Not by a long shot

Comment There is something about Elon Musk's career trajectory that compels onlookers to hang around for the seemingly inevitable crash landing. Tesla, SpaceX, and X – formerly known as Twitter – have all become hosts to the man's galactic ego.

The latest embodiment of his comic book fantasies (he described himself as "dark, gothic MAGA" in the run-up to the US election) is the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, for those who value tech-bro in-jokes more than, say, legal process or government employees' livelihoods.

DOGE recently posted on X to claim it had made progress in persuading the IT team at the US General Services Administration (GSA) to save "$1 million per year by converting 14,000 magnetic tapes (70-year-old technology for information storage) to permanent modern digital records."

For anyone with a passing knowledge of storage technology and the dubious probity of DOGE's proclamations, there is a lot to unpick here. Firstly, Musk's government organization has been caught making claims that later turn out not to be the whole truth. For example, DOGE boasted that it canceled a "wasteful" $3.5 million Department of Veterans Affairs contract for "enterprise mail management program support services."

The Reg later found that a) the contract was run by service-disabled veterans, and b) was set to reach the end of its pre-agreed period ten days later. Other media outlets have also been snooping around some of DOGE's work with equally illuminating results.

(Side note: Did the US General Services Administration "convert" all 14,000 tapes since then? Or is DOGE claiming credit once more for something that was already going to happen?)

Secondly, while magnetic tape is correctly identified as a 70-year-old technology for information storage, DOGE's post is wrong about its relevance to the modern data stack. It is the most cost-effective and stable medium for long-term storage and has benefited from investment from a number of tech companies, not least IBM.

For example, cloud data management company Panzura and IBM together provide a solution which relies on tape for discovering and managing exabyte-scale unstructured data sets, featuring scanning, tiering, migration, and risk and compliance analysis. The IBM Storage Deep Archive is the Diamondback TS6000 tape library, storing up to 27 PB of LTO-9 data in a single rack with 16.1 TB/hour (4.47 GBps) performance. It's equipped with an AWS S3-accessible front end.

But you don't need Reg sister title Blocks & Files to tell you that. X's own community notes popped up ahead of the inevitable pro/anti-Musk rants that followed the DOGE post in question.

It helpfully informed interested users that "despite its age, magnetic tape is still highly favorable for long-term, static data archives. It offers cost-effectiveness (cheaper than disk/cloud), longevity (outlasts disk drives), offline security (resists cyber threats), and high capacity (up to 50TB per tape)." It then offered a link to an IBM website.

But then again, DOGE's own status is in question. DOGE is not a formally recognized federal department as it was created by executive order rather than congressional legislation.

Without getting more detail, it's impossible to know whether the GSA's move off tape was sensible, or whether it's the result of interference from a 20-year-old DOGE henchperson whose earliest historical reference point is Trump's first election victory.

In the end, it may not matter. Who needs evidence and nuance when clickbait, trolling, and LOLs are enough to power the leader of the free world? ®