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Researchers at Sony have created a new kind of magnetic tape that can store 148GB of data per square inch which is impressive in itself but the company is planning to sell cartridges that will hold up to 185TB of data- it's essentially an old school tape with the capacity of a couple of hundred hard drives… well that's not exactly it but it's not too dissimilar.
These new tapes will drastically cut down on the space required for backup libraries amongst other storage needs. The tape is manufactured using a vacuum thin film forming system which creates a string of uniformly orientated nano-crystals in a layer less than five micrometers thick.
Does anyone even remember when these used to be a thing?
The crystals used for recording data are much smaller than previously achieved, averaging around 7.7 nanometres across, this is what allows for huge 148GB data densities per square inch. Sony explained further in a statement: “By optimizing sputter conditions and independently developing a soft magnetic under layer with a smooth interface, Sony has made it possible to minimize disparities in crystalline length and growth.”
These mass storage tapes aren't ready for commercialising just yet but Sony is definitely working on it: “Sony will continue to work towards commercializing this next generation tape storage media, as well as the development of increasingly advanced thin layer deposition technologies based on the sputter method, with the aim of increasing recording densities even further.”
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KitGuru Says: While a breakthrough like this won't send the whole world back to using tapes, it will help out industries that require huge archives of data. I still think it's crazy that there has been such a breakthrough in storage tapes of all things, I can't even remember the last time I saw a cassette tape.
Source: The Register, Sony
Ok they can give it a fancy case that will hide everything and it won’t even look like a cassette tape.
Fair enough to what they’ve discovered here but what is this primarily going to be used for? All i can ever remember tapes are useful for is backup storage.
Surely if they mean real-time storage using tapes would be slow as hell compared to using discs w/ needles found in HDD’s and especially against the way SSD’s function in terms of reading/writing/locating data
So what happens when you want to access data on the last half inch/64GB of tape? Do you have to wait 10 minutes while the ‘tape-player’ forward-rewinds like an old school VCR?!
tapes are widely used in the industry for reliable long term backup. these won’t be aimed at consumers, but tapes are still widely in use
I guess they’ll be aimed at large corporate customers/edu/research for backup and DR purposes.
Tape as a storage medium is awful. Has anyone tried to do a 30TB+ recovery from tape?
SAN disk storage is much more effective.