IBM Research has claimed to have set a world record in storage density on magnetic tape with 123 billion bits of uncompressed data per square inch on low cost, particulate magnetic tape made especially for the project by FujiFilm. This headway will enable 6GB cartridges to boost their capacity to 220TB when the technology is brought to market.

"This ensures that we can continue scaling, doubling capacity every two years, for at least the next 10 years. Also, because of the explosion in the rate at which data is being created, there is a huge demand for cost-effective storage solutions both on premises and in the cloud. And because tape has the lowest total cost of ownership, that's creating all kinds of new applications for tape," said Mark Lantz, manager of exploratory tape, IBM Research.

At just 2-to-3 pennies per GB, even Google is on board with a vast installation of IBM tape drives, adding to the 500 exabytes of data stored on tape worldwide, mostly for seldom needed data such as archived files and backup. Also the major film studios are converting to data tape drives, because they preserve the exact digital representation of a movie, plus can fit many more movies onto data tapes than traditional video tapes.

The only downside is that it takes five to seven years for lab demonstrations of tape capacity to make their way to commercial products, unlike three to five years for other memory storage technologies. Nevertheless, the demonstration shows that tape is not running out of gas, still increasing with Moore's Law, unlike DRAM, SRAM, flash and the optical storage technologies such as PCM.

The main contribution to up its laboratory capacity from 85.9Gb to 123Gb per square inch, according to Lantz, is the precision with which it has come to control its track positioning servo mechanisms. By maintaining nanoscale accuracy of the tape head over the tape, many more tracks, up to 181,300 tracks per inch, have been squeezed into the newest prototype which is read by a 90nm wide giant magnetoresistive (GMR) head. FujiFilm's contribution was allow such high-speed data transfers (up to 360MB/s) to be accurately recorded on its double-coated barium ferrite (BaFe) tape.

"One of our most impressive accomplishments is the demonstrated precision of 5.9nm over the full range of tape speeds from 1.23m/s to 4.15m/s," added Lantz.

By: DocMemory
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