Now, this news may not excite everyday people who never had to deal with hundreds of terabytes on daily basis. If you do on personal level, then perhaps you have relook at your illegal stash of digital movies. Nah. Just kidding. Do what pleases you (but no quote me, ever). Anyways, scientists over at IBM Research has revealed that they have developed a prototype sputtered magnetic tape which is capable of packing as much as 330 terabytes of uncompressed data.
To put things in perspective, that’s about 330 million books that would occupy a bookshelf stretching “slightly beyond the northeastern to the southwestern most tips of Japan” but in a cartridge that is no bigger than the palm of a grown-ass man’s hand. At 201 gigabits per square inch, it has an areal density that is effectively twenty times over the current state-of-the-art commercial tape drives. Twenty-freaking-times! I’ll say that is a freaking huge leap in mass storage solution which may very well benefit the cloud storage industry which can look to magnetic tape as a viable cold storage option.
However, there is no doubt it will be costlier to manufacture as compare to the current magnetic tape technology, but the high capacity it has to offer will eventually outweighs the cost per terabyte, IBM fellow Evangelos Eleftheriou said. Skip ahead for a video if you want more in depth details of this latest development from IBM Research.
Image: IBM.
via The Verge.
