IBM Prepares 100-Terabyte Tape Drives

Roland Piquepaille writes "It's a well-known fact that we're living in an era of data explosion, and that it's not about to stop. So it's not really surprising that IBM researchers are eyeing 100T-byte tape drive. Yes, you read correctly. They want to increase the capacity storage of their largest units by 250 times, from 400 GB to 100 TB. In order to achieve this goal, they're borrowing "nanopatterning" techniques derived from the microprocessor division. Today, the size of a tape track is about 10 microns. They want to reduce it to 0.5 micron -- or 500 nanometers -- in about five years. IBM doesn't really say when a 100-Terabyte tape drive will be available. But more importantly, the company doesn't say a word about future data transfer rates, which today reach a 80 MB/s. Read this overview for more comments about this problem of data transfer rates."

Comments

Re:Go Roland, make some money

[BlueCup]

I misunderstood... completely, ignore me =)

Re:It's about time

[PornMaster]

It's funny to watch people hit by viruses lose everything because they have an external drive to back up to, but never unplug it.

For backups to be archival in nature, it's fundamentally important for them to be off-line when you're not backing up. It's also preferrable to send them off-site, but for the home user, off-line should be the biggest step in incremental value.

Obligatory statement ...

[svin]

100 TBs is a lot of p0rn.

what the?

[phoric]

100 terabytes of storage and we're still using magnetic tape... A fragile, 60+ year old technology?