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IBM and Fuji Announce Tape Storage Breakthrough
robkill writes "IBM and Fuji have announced a breakthrough in the amount of data that can be stored on magnetic tape, a 15X improvement to 6.67 billion bits of data per square inch. IBM estimates that it will be 5 years before this hits the mass market"
When will tape die?
We just spent $30k on a new server. Now we will have to upgrade!
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
is a lot of porn.
What?
Registered Linux user #421033
Tapes... I wonder, could this technology be applied to floppy disks?
If I had a nickle for every time I was told a product would be available in n years, and still wasn't available (n x 3) years later.... I'd have a shitload of nickles.
/me stops wishful thinking and goes back to work.
Please people (companies, etc) - don't tease us until the product is somewhere remotely close to manufacturing!
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
Funny how the article doesn't specifically mention actual storage capacity... Just vague physical dimensions.
Funnypics
How long does it take to write this stuff?
And how long to seek?
Because if it isn't faster than swapping old-technology tapes, it's not worth a damn.
By then my collection will have surpassed this capacity...
I read about it a history book a few years back (right next to zip disks and 8 track players)....
What's next? Commodore 1024?
You've clearly never worked in an enterprise-level environment. Larger companies like WalMart measure their storage requirements in petabytes. To these companies, the physical space required to store tape backups is significant, especially when you consider some records (such as employee records) have to be kept for up to 30 years after the employee leaves the company. Plus, virtually all accounting records must be kept for a large number of years by law.
FYI: Sony claimed 11 billion bits per square inch quite some time ago.
It's always good news when someone figures out how to store more bits into the same amount of space, and I'm sure that companies like IBM and Sony will keep pushing the limits.
Not everyone is a home user. Corporations far more than 26TB of backup tapes, you should see some of the tape libraries I've worked with. Whole rooms full of tapes with automated robots that load and unload them from banks of machines. As for backup speed, tape is not so slow anymore. LTO3 can do over 100MB/second.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Does anyone make an affordable tape backup system in the range of 2TB? I wouldn't want to lose my Minix ISOs.
I don't want it! I don't any more energy draining mechanical machines that are subject to wear and tear. I want solid state! Flash memory! Or whatever you call it. No more moving part machines please.
I need it for all the pictures of your mom.
ranting for mod points.... good job too.... but you didnt close off that last tag.
... it appears to be the day for BREAKTHROUGHS!
Because there are some applications with very large data sets. Molecular modeling is one such case -- a single experiment might yield a couple terabytes of data... That data has to be archived so that the data can be re-examined later.
You'd usually use tapes for archiving, not stuff you'd access alot.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Why use cruddy old tape these days?
This is Slashdot!
I'm waiting for the obligatory clueless slashdot replies-
1. Who needs tape? I can get a couple 200GB IDE drive at Newegg and use the cool RAID controller on my motherboard!
2. Who needs tape? I can get a $50 DVD writer at Newegg and backup to DVD!!!!
3. Who needs tape? I keep my backups on a $30 USB flash stick that I bought at Newegg!
are that it has something to do with "Gettin' Perpendicular"
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
My issue is there is no good low-middle range.. you can get a 12/24 for a decent price but 100/200 is just .. well over priced..
we switched to HDD's in removable racks..
but then agian we don't care about shelf life only making it through a fire
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
So if you combine the tape density breakthrough with the Linux device driver breakthrough, can you go faster than the speed of light? Or does SM just need a thesaurus?
-h-
Okay, so I want to store 400 GB of data daily. I can get 5 external 500 GB HD's (about $1800) and write a simple script to backup everything daily (free). Then I take one drive home everynight, and cycle the drives through the week. I can have all my data backed-up in about 90 minutes. This gives me capacity, redundancy, off-site storage, and speed.
The middle-of-the-road Dell tape autoloader is over $3000 (plus the cost of tapes), and only has a transfer speed of 28 GB/hour. That's over 14 hours to backup my data!!!
So, I'm not real sure where that come up with thier statement about value. I just don't see it.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
Thank You! Reading down the first sets of comments I had to wonder where all the people who knew what they were talking about had gone.
A block of code, sufficiently well-written, is indistinguishable from magick.
Microsoft and Intel together have developed a new floppy disk called the "blu-ppy", capable of holding 100% more than a normal floppy disk, giving a vast 2.88MB recording capacity.
How is world is 100MB/sec not considered slow? You could copy the data 10 times, onto 10 different external hard drives, in less time.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
While Googling for "bits per square inch world record", I found a company claiming 515 gigabits per square inch. Here come the terabyte discs!
Much better article. Thanks.
How long does it take to write this stuff?
And how long to seek?
Because if it isn't faster than swapping old-technology tapes, it's not worth a damn.
Upgraded your tape drive lately? Every time I have gone up one DDS number, the tapes are twice the size and the speed doubles or triples.
But don't worry, I am sure you know better then the people at IBM, must be why you make billion and they do not advising the biggest companies in the world.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
And I'm still waiting for the flat-screen TV you unroll like a poster and tack up with some double-sided tape.
So this IBM announcement fails to excite. Five years is a very long time in the technology industry.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
All you naysayers, understand that we had exactly the same sort of announcements before the Linear Tape Open (LTO) standard was developed. IBM led a group of manufacturers to develop a standard built around a few breakthroughs in tape density and drive head technologies. They predicted 10X (or more) capacity, 5X (or more) throughput, etc. and it would be available in 5 years or so. Sure enough, LTO-1 came about and immediately led to a tape storage boom. Quantum pushed DLT to about its limits, Storagetek upped the ante with their very high speed formats, etc. Everything got cheaper. Tape stayed relevant. I predict the very same trend in the near future...
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
While this is a notable achievement... There are a lot of problems: 1) Areal density is improving exponentially - We should see 2.5TB drives in the next year or so. AND the form factor is moving to 2.5 inch drives to allow vendors to pack more into a physical array. 2) BPI density is growing incrementally. Even this new tape process will be behind (still) by the time it is available. 3) I have customers that have more than 100PB (Yes, PETA) of files on-line. Would you want to try to restore from tape? 4) DR / BC requirements are forcing remotely-mirrored strategies to be able to keep the business alive, in most cases I have seen, with hot-standby processing capability at the remote site. Don't get me wrong - I think tape has a place in the world... As an archive media that will be in a mountain somewhere, "just in case"
My wife doesn't listen to me either...
The MPAA is asking for legislation regulating this technology and imposing mandatory controls on all implementations.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
I wonder, if the disk sizes will keep the dominance in 5 years. They probably will... Or, a major breakthrough in, say, "flash" storage technology will make all other media obsolete...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Is the value of your data that cheap? If so, hdd's may be just the thing for you. The three variables in play are for data backup & restore are: Fast, Reliable & Cheap. Pick any two.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Upgraded YOUR tape drive lately? DDS has to be the slowest "modern" tape formats in existence. I'll never touch one of those drives again. Worthless. Try VXA-2 or M2.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Typically, the more data you pack in a given area, the faster you can also read it. Considering current LTO3 drives can transfer data at rates around 80MB/sec, I imagine it's no slouch.
For random access, yeah, tape blows, but you don't use tape for primary storage anyways. It's for backups or maybe to transport a large amount of data across a distance when you don't have a network connection capable of it.
DLT tape cartridge was 0.5 in x 1700 ft, or 10,000 square inches.
At 0.75 Gbyte/sq in, that's 7.5 Tbyte per tape. That's a lot.
Daniel
Hehe, actually I haven't. It is about time too. My point is still valid though.
The best part about this breakthrough is that we will lose 15 times more data when a tape fails.
Tape backups are great for backups, they just aren't too good at restoring. I just wish hard drive manufacturers would use stronger plastic for SATA connectors, since those use a standardized layout and could potentially be used for hard drive libraries. At less than 50 cents per gigabyte right now, hard drives aren't bad at all. Pay a little more and you can get the shiny new 750gb units for greater density, soon to be 1000gb+ per drive. Yeah, screw tapes!
-Billco, Fnarg.com
I have a 400GB Seagate SATA hard drive and it gets no where near 100MB/s, what kind of hard drive are you planning on using?
In my experience, the trouble is not in writing lots of data to tape, it's in reading it successfully afterwards. /only half-joking
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
First off, no you can't unless you have a PCI-X connection to a storage array. PCI is 128Mbyte/sec at most.
... you're fucked up.
Second, if you think having 10 disks per day you have to backup is a "better idea"
Third, if you really wanted to you could logically stripe your backup.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
That's so 20th Century....
In the 1950's, data was recorded on 7-track tapes at 200 bits per inch. Those 7 tracks recorded 6-bit characters (EBCDIC?) with one bit of parity. A 2400 foot tape might hold some 5 million characters (upper case only, please). By the mid 1960's tape densities more than doubled to 556 bpi.
Sorting algorithms were written to sort information using mag tapes; the speediest would make the tape vibrate in the vacuum columns with a minimum of reel-to-reel motion.
By the 1970's, most shops changed to 800bpi, 9-track tapes, which would happily handle 8-track encoding. Then came 1600 bits per inch -- you could store an amazing 50 megabytes onto a single tape.
There was a constant temptation to compress data so as to stuff as much onto the tape as possible. As a result, many graduate students earned their assistantships by decoding tapes written with oddball parity, density, and encoding combinations.
The scattering matrices from my dissertation are encoded onto 9-track 1600 bpi tapes, carefully stored in my climate uncontrolled attic.
Maybe instead of backing up 400GB a day, you're backing up 10Gb a day, because you're one of the 100 000 small businesses in North America who use servers for email and office documents.
Maybe instead of dropping one of your external USB hard drives on precisely the 600th day you need your backup, you don't. And you spend less than $400 on FIVE external drives that do a differential backup daily in 2 minutes!
In this world, you don't spend thousand on a tape drive, you don't wait hours for a backup, and you live happily ever after. Welcome to the world of the small business where IT managers are the "computer guy" and people like spending $1200, not $6000 for new servers.
I'm sure you will need this technology to back up Duke Nukem Forever, since the Holographic RAM IBM was supposed to release in 2003 core dumps to tape.
Bullshit. You must misunderstand how much 100MB/sec is. Most harddrives can't even sustain that. The WD Raptor only goes up to about 84MB/sec. And that is the max possible. Good luck sustaining that with filesystem overhead and all. A tape drive with a specified transfer rate can actually reliably sustain that rate.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
I mean, here at the UW, everyone just backs up onto secondary disks.
Technically, tape has a 100 year archival lifespan, but that assumes that we still have the technology to read it. In fact, we recently had a hard drive crash that was so old we couldn't recover any data from it, as we couldn't find the software or head to try to recover it.
Naturally, having it on tape does mean it has a longer theoretical life, in that backing up onto CDs or DVDs, which only have 5-10 year max lifespans in standard conditions, for archival purposes is not safe, but by that point even the data formats have changed.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
It should never have been born!
Linux violates 235 Microsoft patents.
I've been using P2P networks for my backups, I simply share all of my files out and when I need to recover them, or I am away from home I use the same P2P
software to search for them.
I need very little local storage and people really seem willing to share the burden of backing up my music and pr0n.
Seriously though, an affordable SOHO backup solution would be nice, the media to backup one of my 250 GB HD's cost more then the 250 GB HD...
so lets hope this generates results that the non-enterprise user can benefit from, not likely but...
Unix, an obscure operating system developed by bored researchers in an attempt to get a better game playing experience.
Good old times. -- Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
I use flash cards. Cheap, store 1 GB on a tiny device, plug in to any USB port.
OK, I have an external HD for backup, but seriously, most of my data archive just gets shoved on my key ring.
Haven't used tape in more than a decade.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Funny how to image accompanying this article is a picture of a random asian man looking at an ultrasound of a brain. I wonder if this has anything to do with the article at all?
Sigs are for Terrorists.
I need it for all the pictures of your mom.
Yo momma so fat, I need all that storage for just one picture of her.
In my _home_ network (server w/ 1.2TB online, 1TB in a hw raid5, 250GB for 'scratch', 4 desktop PCs, 1 laptop), I use an LTO2 drive for backups, but keep monthly backups for 15 months, keep weekly backups (mostly differential/incrementals) for 4 months, and keep daily backups (incremental of only 'critical' data) for 2 months. My wife complained that I didn't have a _longer_ term backup recovery plan--so now I've added yearly tapes that I never plan to re-use.
I spent $1500 on the tape drive, but buy tapes for less than $30. Currently I have >3.5TB in backups on ~20 tapes, and I can follow a very fixed pattern of tape rotation (tape change 2x per week, use the same daily tape all week, switch to a weekly/monthly/yearly tape on the weekend, then switch back to a daily tape for the next week). OK, so I've got about $2100 in this backup strategy, and I could store 3.5TB on about $2000 worth of 500GB drives, but how would I rotate them, and how would I protect nearly all of the data against fire all the time? (I keep my non-mounted tapes in the 1800lb fireproof safe right next to the server). Furthermore, 2 years from now, when I've used ~30 tapes, I'll still have those critical files my wife or child accidentally deleted in late 2006.
I'll be the first to admit my home server is large for 'normal' people, but this is slashdot--surely others here have larger setups?
-se
AC is correct. Mod it insightful. Thanks.
Diskettes are magnetic media, just like tape is... is there any particular reason that you couldn't get the same storage density on a floppy? It'd at least have the advantage of much faster seek times than tape, I'm sure.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
AC #2 is also correct. Also mod it insightful. And this as well, just to avoid an infinite number of repetitions. Thanks.
In fact without a fiber connection the drives we have would outrun and scsi connection we have available.
Here is a good page with some information about different offerings from IBM from the last 20 odd years.
http://www.dpts.co.uk/hdm02.htm
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
http://www.ducttapefashion.com/ oh, wrong tape... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_tape It's still cheaper per bit that hd or optical, and has proven life. You're not going to see it in common computers, but for things like the internet archive, http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2002/07/01 Where the cost of hard drives is prohibitive because the amount of data is HUGE, it may just make sense to use tape.
I wouldn't consider the mad hatter mad. Just reality impaired. He sure can make a mean cup of tea.
Well, tape drives that have been around for a few years are cheap. It's new tape drives that are expensive.
For example, during one of my backup obsessions, I got a HP SureStore Tape 12000e for about $25 on eBay. It's a DDS-2 autoloader. Holds six 4GB (native, allegedly 8GB compressed) tapes in a magazine and changes them on command.
A few years ago, such a device would have set me back a few thousand bucks. Now, because people have moved to DDS-4 and higher, they're dirt cheap. There's nothing wrong with them, it's just an issue of capacity. (Though I think most people could probably fit their most important stuff in less than 8GB, counting documents only, no MP3s, warez, porn, applications, or system files, and backing up things like digital photos separately.)
Compared to hard drives of similar capacities, tape drives have always been expensive from a home user's perspective, at least in the recent past. I suspect they'll stay this way in the future: the economies of scale are simply not there to make tape drives as inexpensive to manufacture as HDs. However, it's not hard to find ones that are a generation or two old for rock-bottom prices and still have a lot of life left in them.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
In his book "Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security", James Bamford claims that in 2001 the NSA had tape technology that could store 10 GB per square inch.
Now that they're sucking all the IP data out of AT&T's switches, and keeping records of every call placed in the US, I bet their backup needs have increased a tad... Wonder what their current storage capacity is.
using System.Awesome;
NASA and the Navy used 7-track tape for many years due to their use of certain UNIVAC computers (Naval Tactical Data System, AN/USQ-20) which were designed before the introduction of 9-track tape.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
OK, so if you can only sustain 84mbps to a hard drive, how can you write to a tape at faster than that? Do hard drives read faster than they write?
If your not part of the solution you are the problem.
Here's how you can ride this train:
1. Invest in tape storage companies.
2. Vote Republican.
3. The entire internet is recorded in real time.
4. Your stock goes up.
5. Profit!!!!!
(Note for the humor impared. This is 'sarcasm' http://www.webster.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?va=sarca sm)
Simple calculus? Like, you mean, elementary school geometry? How'd you even get a circumference of 80 from a diameter of 13 anyway? Am I missing something here?
Where are the super high resolution displays they said would be on the consumer market years ago. Some time around 2001, IBM some how came up with some kind of scoring process that was supposed to make high res LCD displays cheaper than conventional LCDs. They said within a year doctors offices would get them with consumer laptops to follow. Nice prediction. They even had this on their main website and then it just silently slipped.
I have a 400GB Seagate SATA hard drive and it gets no where near 100MB/s, what kind of hard drive are you planning on using?
I got two 74Gb WD Raptors in RAID 0, which can write 90-95Mbyte/s sustained (perhaps more, I measured it using VirtualDub, "recoding" an AVI to uncompressed rgb on an NTFS partition).
How many tapes would it take to backup Google?
VXA-2 ist biggest piece of shit technology i've ever encountered.
We normally use LTO Tapes (mostly 1 and 2), but some customers wanted a "budget" solution. So they got VXA-2 Tapedrives from IBM.
Some points:
* They are slow, and i mean real slow. 250-300mb/min slow
* The tapes look like they are gonna break if i look at them, no comparison to LTO Tapes which look sturdy
* The loading mechanism sucks, and also look liks it's going to break
* Two of those VXA-2 Tapedrives actually broke after 2-3 Months in use. Yeah, got replaced in 4 hours, but it sucks nonetheless
* The tapes are EXPENSIVE. Cost more than an LTO2 Tape without even half the capacity
Or, in short:
Never buy VXA-2. Buy LTO1 or LTO2. If you can afford it, LTO3.
Most were never here. Those of us who someone arrived here by accident, thinking that there were people here who knew what they were talking about, have either long since left or remain to troll for our own personal entertainment.
You read from a RAID, of course. If you have something like LTO3, which costs about $2.5K per drive (IIRC) you almost certainly have one of those already.
I think the point here was that tape *can* be faster than hard disks. To get a sustained 100MB/s you need at least a couple good drives, not the cheap consumer stuff.
IIRC, the better tape drives like LTO have the ability to slow down if data isn't coming fast enough. The cheaper ones like DDS will just stop the tape and sit there, which wears the tape, but DDS4 writes at about 2.5MB/s anyway.
Yes, I guess that would make sense. I forgot about RAID's speed increase. Even though I don't care for Tape Backups as I find them much more difficult to use and maintain, I'm sure they will be around for years to come. Since I don't deal with many Enterprise Level backup solutions I haven't had to use but one or two tape loaders and when I did they just seemed very confusing and complicated.
Obviously if you worked with them all the time I'm sure that wouldn't be the case. I do know however that we have replaced almost 100% of the small single drive tape backups we encounter in our customer's machines with either online backup or external drives with great success.
Granted they are dealing with a few GB of data max, but products like Acronis' True Image and Symantec's Livestate Recovery or Ghost have matured into very robust and reliable backup solutions. Even if you are a big tape fan I would recommend you play with them as they offer more than just traditional backup. I know that Livestate has saved me a ton of time 3 times in the past two years by allowing me to recover from a complete machine failure in a couple hours rather than a couple days.
Not trying to bash tapes, just had plenty of bad experiances with them that are probably more the user's fault than the tapes, but none the less, the part of the industry I'm in you can't get rid of the EU.
-Ashley
If your not part of the solution you are the problem.
Thinking highly of yourself, are you? Bah. Oh, wait - did I just do what you alluded to be doing in the latter part of your post?
After you take the integral of the derivative of 2(pi)r, you inadvertantly replace "r" with "d" to get approximately 80. Like he said, simple calculus.
How many people will have forgotten that Google even existed by the time they finish restoring all the data back from the tapes?
Been using Exabyte VXA-1 and VXA-2 drives/autoloaders/media for many years with great success. Very nice for quick recovery of small file sets. Half the hardware price of LTO. Yeah you get what you pay for, but if it works it works, and for me thus far it's worked.
5 Years ago 40 GB drives were high end for desktop users, and most Dells and such came with 20GB 5200 rpm drives IIRC.
I appreciate that since this is tape storage it's not the greatest point of reference, but when they say 5 years that means 7. What's the point of all this madness; all these companies have been posting fantastic leaps and bounds in storage which should be on the market in over half a decade. Five years ago people laughed at me for having a 120GB array and now they laugh at my terabyte of storage, only thing it they're still metal platter disks, no holography/3d storage, not solid state drives with ungodly limits, not phat tape drives.
This kind of research annoys me because I have yet to see the fruits of all their labor, even last gens labor.
Who needs Newegg? I can get all those media for 10% less at Best Buy
Where's the standard units of measurement? Such as how many Libraries of Congress is this?
But seriously, why can't they just say, compared to a LTO-3 tape, which holds XGB, this increased density will allow the same tape to hold Y GB.
I'd rather use 500 1GB flash drives... there's no reason to keep all of that data in one place.
This just in! 3 out of 4 people make up 75% of the population.
Yo momma so fat that I had to use MBone to dl her picture.
Defining Statistics and Social Research
Of bandwidth measurement of VW Beetles of Tape / hour?
It's all about having a good backup strategy. For home users the USB/Firewire removable drives are probably good enough. If your business continuity depends on your data you need better. Disk for online backup, tape for offsite. You need both.
If the disk backup is online all the time you risk losing your backups to errors (OS or human) but are
great for automated restores (i.e. the "I deleted the $IMPORTANT_SPREADSHEET from the shared drive" problem). Tape is used to get your business back up and running after disasters of all sorts. Find a good storage service. A lot of companies in the World Trade Center kept their offsite backups in the other tower.
Oh yes, the most important bit is to test your recovery procedures. I've seen too many cases where people thought their backups were good but they missed critical files. If you haven't tested your restore you don't have a good backup.
Me personally, I keep my important files on my file server on a RAID1 (mirror) array and use a USB drive for backups periodically. For home use I find that using the philosophy of "never trust a single spindle" works for most cases. I still need to add an offsite backup though.
I used to keep archived stuff offline on tape/floppy/ZIP disk but with disk as cheap as it is I just keep it all online and keep migrating new drives into the server array.
For long term storage (5+ years) I just don't know. Magnetic media has fade, burned optical media won't last all that long (it's just emulsion). Pressed optical (DVD/CD) media will probably last a bit longer but the adhesives used to hold the plastic together may degrade over the longer term.
The obscure we see eventually. The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer. - Edward R. Murrow
The problem with payroll/HR/whatnot data is not so much keeping it but having the metadata around to read it in a few years.
Most IT departments have the rack of permanantly archived tapes that the government requires them to keep. In many cases they were written by various payroll/HR/whatnot systems that are no longer in use and nobody has the metadata to read them.
In the olden days we just used a tape that was going to be tossed anyway. In rare case that you needed to read it if you couldn't because of media fade or lack of metadata you just called it lost data.
The government requires you to HAVE the data not be able to READ the data.
I imagine it could be a lot better now by saving it as XML with it's associated Schema. It sure would beat mapping the data to a COBOL WORKING STORAGE definition.
The obscure we see eventually. The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer. - Edward R. Murrow
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Actually, from what I have read Hard Drives DO read about twice as fast as they write. The transfer rate quoted is usually the read speed. You would need a fairly burly RAID array to break 100MB/s write speed. RAID 5 usually has poor write speeds and a plain RAID 0 is obviously not going to cut it for anything mission critical.
Sony's achievement used helical scan -- IBM's is with linear tape, which is much more commonly used for data storage. Also, Sony used evaporated metal tape. IBM used the economical "dual-coat" tape, which is a newly created formulation of Fuji Photo Film's NANOCUBIC tape.
n ews.20060516_magnetic.html
For more details, and magnetic force microscope images of the bits themselves, see: http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/pr.nsf/pages/