IBM Sets Areal Density Record for Magnetic Tape

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."

What about write speed?

[ircmaxell]

So what about speed? What good is the ability to store 35TB of data, if it takes you a week to write/read it?

Re:Who needs a station wagon?

[afidel]

Storage capacity of this tape ~35,000GB
LTO tape = 4.15" Height x 0.85" Width x 4.02" Depth or 2,324 mm^3 giving ~15GB/mm^3
The biggest MicroSD card I could find was 32GB
Width: 11 mm x Length: 15 mm x Thickness: 1 mm or 165 mm^3 giving 0.194GB/mm^3


Conclusion:
This tape trashes microsd for storage density, heck even LTO4 drives beat microsd by ~50%.

Stupid Units

[Doc Ruby]

Why bother explaining how many miles of bookshelves would be needed to hold some amount of digital data? We don't explain how long a bookshelf would have to be to hold all the data in an HDTV screenful, and 35TB data tapes are probably going to hold more graphics than text. Besides, how big is the type in the books filling that shelf? And who but a librarian is going to relate to miles of bookshelves as a meaningful comparison, anyway?

Why don't they say "a 35TB tape is enough to hold 5 million full CDs, or 7,778 full DVDs? That's a comparison that people could actually relate to, that is actually factual, and isn't just some kind of primitive awe at how efficient we've become now that we store data on something not made of mashed trees.

Re:In other news...

[timeOday]

for organizations that have large storage requirements you can't get any cheaper than tape

Are you so sure? Quantum claims that their DLT-V4 tape offers the lowest media cost/GB in its class at just $0.12 [quantum.com]. That's not including the drive, and they are not free. So it's $120/TB just for the media, which is about 30% more than a hard drive. And 1 TB isn't one tape, it's half a dozen of them, so that's fun.

Now, you could argue it's not fair to consumer hard drives to "enterprise" tape, but that's kind of the point. Tape is a niche product, so it might be a bad deal simply because the economies of scale aren't as good.

Reliability? Hard to say. Tape and HDDs are both magnetic media, but HDD platters are sealed off from the environment with a micron-level filter. Tapes aren't sealed as well.

Re:Who needs a station wagon?

[Anonymous Coward]

LTO tape = 4.15" Height x 0.85" Width x 4.02" Depth or 2,324 mm^3 giving ~15GB/mm^3

That calculation is not correct.

4.02" = 105mm
0.85" = 22mm
4.02" = 102mm

105 x 22 x 102 = 235 620 mm^3 (about 100 times more than your calculation)

35 000 / 235 620 = 0.149 GB/mm^3

Conclusion: 32GB microsd cards have slightly higher density than these new super tapes.

Re:What about write speed?

[the_other_chewey]

... a quick google shows present tapes take between 25-50 passes to fill a tape at ~7 minutes per pass, god that's slow.

Slow? 35TB, 50 passes, 7 minutes per pass: 1.6GB/s [google.com] (using decimal prefixes of course...)
I doubt it'll be that fast in practice, but slow it isn't.