IBM Sets Areal Density Record for Magnetic Tape 135
digitalPhant0m writes to tell us that IBM researchers have set a new world record for areal data density on linear magnetic tape, weighing in at around 29.5 billion bits per square inch. This achievement is roughly 39 times the density of current industry standard magnetic tape. "To achieve this feat, IBM Research has developed several new critical technologies, and for the past three years worked closely with FUJIFILM to optimize its next-generation dual-coat magnetic tape based on barium ferrite (BaFe) particles. [...] These new technologies are estimated to enable cartridge capacities that could hold up to 35 trillion bytes (terabytes) of uncompressed data. This is about 44 times the capacity of today's IBM LTO Generation 4 cartridge. A capacity of 35 terabytes of data is sufficient to store the text of 35 million books, which would require 248 miles (399 km) of bookshelves."
Oh boy! (Score:3, Insightful)
"The Library of Congress burned down? No worries chief! I got the whole thing backed up on the tape right here in my desk. (opens and closes drawers) Right here.. in.. my... oh shizzle."
Re:What about write speed? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:In other news... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:In other news... (Score:3, Insightful)
Tape is dead. Long live Tape.
Don't need to transport HDDs. You just need a big fat fiber-optic connection.
And what is the point of archiving if in a few years you can't find the drives or the controllers or the whatever to read the media? Having been in this industry for this long, I've already experienced having an archive of something but not able to find a drive to read it. Remember the old TRS-80 and the audio tape drives? State of the art 30-35 years ago, utterly useless today. Even if I could find a cassette player, I'd still have no way for any modern computer to read it, short of inventing it over again.
You think that is rare? How about 8" floppies?, How about Zip, Bernoulli drives, Heck it is getting hard to find 3.5" drives.
If your archival horizon is longer than about 10 years, you're looking at the wrong life cycle planning. Do you think whatever flavor of SAS we have today is going to exist in 15 years?
Re:What about write speed? (Score:4, Insightful)
If the areal density increases uniformly in both directions, then you can expect that the read/write speed goes up by the square root of the areal density increase. That is, for 43.75 you'd expect a speed increase of at least between 6 and 7 times. Note that sometimes the density increase is achieved in only one direction or the other, depending on what technology was used to achieve it, in which case all or none of the density increase results in speed increase.
You can achieve speed increases by using multiple heads. LTO and the 3590/3592 proprietary tape technology on which it is based use 8 or 16 tracks read/written simultaneously, with tracks interleaved. There might be 256 tracks with tracks 1, 17, 33, ..., 241 being accessed, then 2, 18, ..., 242. etc. Doubling the number of tracks (density increase of 2 widthwise) wouldn't increase read/write speed. Doubling the number of tracks while simultaneously doubling the number of heads would.
Note that with 8 or 16 heads spread across the tape width, error correction is achieved by writing a matrix of bits (across the tape as well as down the length) with ECC bits added.