Fujifilm and IBM Set World Record With 580TB Magnetic Tapes

(Photo: Fujifilm)

Co-ordinate to IBM, by the fourth dimension we reach 2025 the world will be creating 175 zettabytes of information. That's 175 trillion gigabytes, and nosotros need a cost-constructive way of storing information technology all. The solution? A new epitome magnetic tape that breaks the recording density globe tape.

Mark Lantz, Manager of Advanced Tape Technologies at IBM Research, explains how researchers at IBM and Fujifilm brought together more than than 15 years of piece of work to set a new world record in tape storage. What they achieved is an areal density of 317Gbpsi (gigabits per square inch), which translates to a single record capable of storing 580 terabytes of data.

Fujifilm magnetic tape

Photo: Fujifilm

In society to reach such a high areal density, the research team had to develop a brand new record and created Strontium Ferrite (SrFe) in the process. Existing magnetic tapes rely on Barium Ferrite (BaFe), but SrFe offers the potential for college density storage in the same amount of tape. Alongside that, the team as well "developed a family unit of new servo-mechanical technologies including a new servo pattern that is pre-recorded in the servo tracks, a prototype head actuator and a set of servo controllers." The terminate result is a very high capacity record that can be read while moving at a speed of 15km/h (9.3mph).

Although tape is very old technology, having first been introduced in 1952, it has continued to improve and remains an extremely cheap (pennies per gigabyte) fashion of bankroll upwards lots of data. It too helps that the tapes remain readable for many decades and offer the advantage of allowing a concrete barrier past default. Stealing data stored on these tapes would mean really stealing the tapes and having access to the correct equipment to read them.

In that location's no discussion nonetheless on when this new magnetic record will leave the inquiry lab and enter the data centre, but it looks probable to serve as the cloud storage archival format of choice when it eventually does.