Having worked on new technologies for years, IBM has been able to achieve success in collaboration with Sony Storage Media Solutions, who manufactured the tape, giving a new purpose to the magnetic tape drives, originally invented 60 years ago.
Within the past decade, IBM has managed to bump the aerial density from 6.67 gigabits/sq. inch (in 2006) to 201 gigabits/sq. inch.
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With this much aerial density, it’s possible to put around 330TB of uncompressed data in a single cartridge. For a reference, you can consider this an equivalent of 300 million books.
The new development manifests the potential of doubling tape storage capacity almost every two years and assuring that tape won’t go out fashion for the decade, according to Dr. Mark Lantz of IBM Research.
As the cloud is now being considered as the main form of backup storage, sputtered tapes can find their utility as cloud-based cold storage solutions used to preserve user data for years. The high capacity storage can also bring down the per terabyte cost, making sputtered tapes a viable option.
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Source: The Verge
