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mag tape

Some of the earliest computers relied upon record drives for storage, but we've since moved on to faster and more versatile storage technologies. Nonetheless, tape drives continue to exist in enterprise, and they've been advancing by leaps and bounds while you haven't been paying attention. IBM merely announced a new record in data storage density — 201 gigabits per square inch on a magnetic tape (that's one foursquare inch of information technology above). That works out to a whopping 330TB of uncompressed data on a unmarried tape drive cartridge.

IBM reached this plateau in magnetic tape density by developing several new technologies. Older versions of IBM's magnetic tape used a thin moving-picture show of barium ferrite particles applied to the surface like paint. "Sputtered tape" uses several layers of thin metal movie that are practical using a new vacuum technology. A layer of lubricant is besides practical to the reading surface of the tape to keep the tape in practiced working order as information technology's run through the drive. The higher density arrangement of magnetic nanoparticles will, of form, require new bulldoze technology to read.

The new magnetic tape design was created in partnership with Sony, which has been working with IBM on this technology for several years. In fact, the ii companies shared a previous record in so-called areal recording density in 2022 when they hitting 148 gigabits per square inch. The latest innovation far surpasses that mark with sputtered magnetic record, merely the density is technically lower than the best spinning hard drives.

The meaty design of a record drive cartridge is what makes the medium and then useful — you lot tin fit a lot more surface area in reels of magnetic record than you lot tin can with spinning difficult bulldoze platters. The largest electric current hard drives are 12TB in chapters, and you'd need 28 of these drives to match the storage in just ane cartridge using the new sputtered magnetic tape. And then why don't we all use magnetic record drives? They're more delicate than hard drives, and the speeds are considerably slower. Withal, magnetic tape is ideal for long-term data archival.

IBM claims past using sputtered tape technology, information technology will be able to double the data capacity of its tape drive cartridges every two years for at least the next decade. If true, that would work out to an virtually unfathomable ten.5 petabytes of storage in a single cartridge past 2027. Some of your online data is probably stored (or at least backed upwardly) with tape drives right at present. If IBM'southward predictions of capacity increases are truthful, at that place might be a lot more of it on tape drives in the hereafter.

Now read: Who Makes the Nigh Reliable Difficult Drives?