IBM, Fujifilm developing 8 terabyte magnetic tape cartridges
By Evan Blass 
posted May 17th 2006 9:37AM
posted May 17th 2006 9:37AM
If you thought that magnetic tape cartridges were headed the way of Zip disks and five-and-a-quarter-inch floppies into the storage medium graveyard, think again, because IBM and Fujifilm are currently working together to make the venerable technology capable of storing a Blu-ray-humbling eight terabytes-per-cartridge. Using barium ferrite crystal film from Fuji and read/write technology from IBM, the two companies are reporting success in creating storage densities of up to 6.67 billion-bits/square-inch, which is something like fifteen times the capacility of current backup tape. Unfortunately there is no word yet if the cartridges, which should be available in about five years, will be able to fit in your old 8-track player for rocking millions and millions of MP3s.
Only if it comes with the quality haircut.
Make fun of tape all you want; there are plenty of companies out there using massive silos and ordering tapes for backup or (mostly) archival by the container load who would pay anything for 8TB carts.
Hopefully like the tapes there will be a giant leap in access speed to go along with it. If all they have done is make current 500GB/1TB tapes 8 to 16 times longer, it won't help as much as you might first think.
Tapes... bring-on flash memory. Albeit it's pricey, but faster and smaller and better.
"Only if it comes with the quality haircut."
- Gotta love that one, I have a thing for the 60's :)
One thing I'm a bit 'worried' about. That amount of space on a tape... Well, it means that you can backup loads of machines on one tape. How are they going to handle restores? Doing a backup and restoring files at the same time is a bit tricky I guess. Especially if you've got 8Tb at your disposal.
In next five years this technology won't become massive, because it's only just tests. But just think a bit, we are returning to tape cartridges... Maybe soon we'll return even to lamps? :)
Tapes are one of the best ways for nightly backups or servers. For example, one of my servers at works backs up to a 64GB tape every night. Every Monday one of the tapes is taken off-site in case of fire. There's no backup solution that can match the storage capacity of tapes. Now, I wouldn't put my MP3s on it, but I don't think anyone would be stupid enough to. I remember my dad using casette tapes to load work onto his Commodore 64... he hit play, got something to drink, maybe eat, came back and worked.
that should be "night backups for servers" above...
Uhh, #3, the reason people use tape drives nowadays is that allows a VERY large amount of data to be stored and recovered in a cost effective method. I'd like to see YOU spend the money for many backups of a several giga-or-terabyte database, let alone the mountains of data produced by research facilities (the ones with automated cartridge silos) that have to be stored. In these applications, tape is far superior to any other method of storage. Flash would be INCREDIBLY VERY MUCH WAY too expensive, and HDDs wouldn't be so good for plain archiving.
And #1's comment wins the internet.
In a related story, IBM to bring Token Ring networks back.
Ha. Tape will never die. Those who would belittle it have obviously never been a (competent) network admin.
That girl is hot! I'd really like to see more of her! I bet she never knew back then she would become an internet celeb.
"capacility"?
I wonder how much the tapes and tape drives would cost. Your standard LTO3 tape drive is around $5K+, so I hope these don't scale by capacity.
The "Scalar 10K" from adic can hold 13,884 tapes and stores 11,107TB (That's 10.85 PETABYTES)
Do you have any idea how many lines of text that is!?!
10 Terabytes = All the material in the U.S. Library of Congress
2 Petabytes (2048 Terabytes) = All U.S. academic research libraries
5,000 Petabytes (5 Exabytes) = All words ever spoken by human beings... ever... that's every single thing anyone has ever said EVER!
5 Exabytes is the largest amount that anyone could ever dream of storing. Even all the data NASA collects from the Earth Orbiting System (EOS) is only ~300TB. (And that's an unbelievabled amount of data... one that's so large a research firm couldn't dream of matching the data collected by EOS.
Alright... ending spasm... now.
Wow, its a nice and new technology.