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"

Comments

I wonder, what disk sizes will be in 5 years...

[mi]

Currently the cheap and slow large-capacity harddrives are the best deal per gigabyte for data-storage. And they are always on-line. If you want an off-site backup — simply arrange with a like-minded person (or company) to exchange your (encrypted) backups via the internet. A fully automated solution without the daily trips to the safe-deposit box (which is what you are supposed to do with the tapes).

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...

Remember Write Rings? 1600 bpi? 800 bpi? 556bpi?

[Cliff Stoll]

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.

Re:Death?

[zippthorne]

So.. you don't spool your tape? You'd just kind of have it lying around.. flat.. on the floor?

Who cares about the AREA required. We don't live in flatland. Tape is freaky thin. What is the VOLUME required for all that storage.

Re:Death?

[bhiestand]

The biggest tapes (as best I could find in a quick web search) hold 400GB each.

Let's just say your web search was incomplete. About four years ago I worked for a company that made parts for 1TB tape drives. I know they have at least 8TB tape cartridges developed now. I'm sure the price per byte is more expensive than modern, cheap consumer hard drives, though. Keep in mind you're comparing apples to oranges, and essentially complaining that it's much harder to peel an apple. Companies that need large tape drives for backup need tapes instead of hard drives for a reason.