IBM scientists have managed to fit 330TB of uncompressed data into a tiny cartridge that will fit in the palm of your hand.
IBM scientists have set a new world record by packing 330 terabytes of uncompressed data (or the equivalent of 330 million books) onto a cartridge that can fit in the palm of your hand. The 201 gigabits per square inch recording on a prototype thin magnetic tape is 20 times greater than the areal density used in today's commercially available tapes. Areal recording density is the amount of information that can be stored on a given surface area of material.
In the original photo, IBM scientist Dr. Mark Lange holds a piece of metallized tape, which can hold 201 Gigabytes, which is a new world record.
For the record, magnetic tape machines were invented over 60 years ago and have traditionally been used to archive tax documents and healthcare records. The first IBM tape machine used reels of half-inch tape and could store about 2 megabytes. Magnetic tape was developed by Sony as a storage media solution, and it has managed to endure to this day.
According to Mr. Evangelos Eleftheriou, IBM executive, magnetic tape has traditionally been used for video archives, file back-ups, but also in industry for off-premise applications in the cloud. While the metallized tape is expected to cost slightly more to manufacture than current commercial tape, the potential for high capacity will make the cost per terabyte very attractive, making this technology practical for cloud storage.”.
