IBM Research and Fujifilm
set a new world record in magnetic tape density—nearly 30G bits per square inch—which
they say will keep magnetic tape alive for another decade.
Magnetic tape might seem old-fashioned, but after a long
career it still is a billion-dollar market because it offers higher storage
densities, costs less and has a greener footprint, according to IBM
Research (Zurich).
"Magnetic tape, which is the greenest storage
technology available today, is alive and will continue to be a cost-effective
alternative to other storage technologies for at least another decade,"
said IBM Fellow Evangelos Eleftheriou in a video. "Achieving
29.6G bits per square inch means that a single cartridge 10 by 10 by 2
centimeters in size will hold up to 35 terabytes of uncompressed data."
The low one-penny-per-gigabyte price of IBM
and Fujifilm's latest tape formulation will likely keep magnetic tape cost-effective
until denser optical disks are developed. Today's densest optical disks are
Blu-ray, which stores just 50GB. To store the equivalent of one 4-inch tape
cartridge holding 35TB (35,000GB) would require 700 Blu-ray disks at about 30
cents per gigabyte.
Alternately, storing that much data on hard disk drives
(HDDs), which hold about a terabyte each, would require 35 drives at about 10
cents per gigabyte. Cloud computers and data centers mostly use HDDs today
because they offer instant access to any datum, but HDDs do not offer tape's
removable media for archiving multiple backup sets. Tape also has a "green"
advantage over HDDs, especially for data that is seldom accessed, such as
historic archives and documents maintained for regulatory compliance.
"If you take a tape-based library and compare it to a
similar HDD-based library, it typically takes 200 times more power than the
tape system and, similarly, has a much larger carbon footprint," said Mark
Lantz, a Research staff member. "And the reason for that is that tape is a
removable media where one or two tape drives can serve as a library for
thousands of tapes, and all of the tapes that are not being accessed do not
consume any power. Whereas in disk-based systems, the disks are for reliability
reasons always spinning and consuming power."
IBM Research (Almaden,
Calif.) designed a new reduced-friction
head assembly for the ultra-narrow, 200-nanometer-wide giant magneto-resistive
(GMR) head. The tape formulation used
perpendicularly oriented barium ferrite (BaFe) "nanocubic" particles.
Track widths were reduced 25 times to under 450 nanometers wide using 24-nanometer
accuracy in track positioning.
Next, IBM aims to further
increase the density of its tape formulation to 100G bits per square inch in
anticipation of massive storage needs for recorded video from the millions of
surveillance cameras now recording traffic patterns, the food supply chain,
health records and financial transactions.
