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

That...

[remembertomorrow]

is a lot of porn.



What?

Re:Death?

[Ryan Amos]

When a 500 GB hard drive costs $75, can be thrown across the room and have a chance of working, weighs the same as a tape and can be easily inserted/removed in bulk with software management and barcode readers to keep track of it all for you.

Until then, tape will stick around. I have a feeling it might be a while.

Re:No capacity mentioned.

[MeanMF]

Here's a better article.. They're claiming 8TB before compression on an LTO-sized tape. Tape record smashed with 8 terabyte format

Re:Death?

[digitalunity]

Which is just as good, the sheer size obtainable using tape drives is just mind boggling.

On a side note, this article wasn't just light on details, it was shockingly devoid of all technical details as to how this was acheived. At least this article mentions the new density is acheived with a new tape medium coating.

Sheesh, the linked story might be interesting to stock-market droids, not slashdot readers.

This sounds EXACTLY like the early days of LTO

[csoto]

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...