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

Data transfer rates

[IO ERROR]

We have to solve the problem of data transfer rates. It is patently silly to wait three days for your 100TB backup to finish.

I don't know where the solution here will come from, but I expect for the meantime this kind of large capacity will be used more for archival storage of old data than for backup.

Is there any research out there into the data transfer rate problem?

Re:I bet it's worth the money...

[MP3Chuck]

Well ... 74 minutes of stereo 16-bit 44.1khz audio is about 650MB. 8.783MB/minute. For the sake of argument, let's assume a 100 year lifespan. 100 years = 52,594,876.6 minutes. 461,982,024.189 MB (440.580 TB) for 100 years of CD-quality audio. Convert to 128 kb/s MP3 and you're looking at about 44TB, give or take. (128kbps .MP3 is about 1/10 size of a .wav).

So in a sense you are quite right! :)