Working with linear magnetic tape developed by Fuji Photo Film Co Ltd, IBM said it has laid down data at 6.7bn bits per square inch, which it says is more than fifteen times denser than the most popular tape standard shipping today.
When the new hardware and tape becomes available in about five years, a mid-range LTO tape cartridge could hold 8TB of data, IBM said. That would be 20 times the uncompressed capacity of current mid-range LTO-3 tapes.
The message from the medium is that the future of tape looks good, as IBM was keen to stress. As long as tape stays significantly cheaper than disk it will continue to sell. A 20-fold increase in cartridge capacity by 2011 would increase its cost over disk yet further, even allowing for improvements in disk technology.
The giants of the disk drive industry, Seagate Technology LLC and Hitachi Ltd are both in the process of moving to the latest perpendicular recording technology in order to continue increasing disk density, and hence lower its cost. Seagate, which is leading the charge into PR disk, says that within next three to four year PR will enable it to ship 3.5in drives with 2TB capacity – only a five-fold increase on current 3.5in capacities.
