IBM, the technology giant, has a huge research section that over the years has created various major breakthroughs. And yet again, in a new development, the IBM team has come up with a magnetic tape drive prototype that can store a gigantic uncompressed data up to 330 TB fitting in the palm of your hand. They have surpassed the previous record of 220 TB of uncompressed data. For years, IBM Research functioned together with Sony Storage Solutions to attain better areal recording densities and create this magnetic tape.
If you are speculating about the recording density, the tape comes with an extraordinary 201GB per inch density, which is a world record and is more than 20x the density of existing commercial tape drives. After the initial tape unit developed by IBM that could store up to 2 MB of data; this development is a big breakthrough in the future of tape storage. Developed over 60 years ago, generally, storage tapes are utilized by companies to archive enormous amounts of data such as health care records, tax documents, and so on.
The innovation attainment was jointly declared by the 2 firms at the 28th Magnetic Recording Conference held in Japan. Evangelos Eleftheriou, IBM Research fellow, said, “Traditionally, the tape has been utilized for video archives, retention of data on premise, copies for disaster recovery, backup files, but the business is also growing to off-premise uses in the cloud.”
He further said, “While sputtered tape is likely to charge a little more for production than the existing commercial tape, the prospective for very high capacity will make the price per terabyte agreeable, making this invention practical for cold storing in the cloud.”
Sony, in its announcement regarding the magnetic tape cartridge, said that this accomplishment was made possible by fetching together its new magnetic tape technology using lubricant with the newly developed read/write heads, advanced signal-processing algorithm, and innovative servo control technologies of IBM Research—Zurich. Further, it pinpointed that sealing the space between the magnetic head and magnetic tape is important to attain the high-density recording capabilities for tape storage media.
Stimulatingly, IBM has also said that this development is also insightful of the possibility of maximizing storage constantly on tapes for another decade. They mentioned that their storage requirements have been increasing for years with technological advancements. This kind of accomplishment gives faith that their data need will be fulfilled with enhancement in technology and they won’t be ill-equipped to address the state going forward.
