With the proliferation of CDs and subsequent disc-based technology, storing data on magnetic bands of tape has largely disappeared from the public’s eye. The technology is so far removed, that in some cases, children can’t intuitively recognize the purpose of a Walkman. Regardless, tapes are not gone, and in fact, may be making a comeback. Just announced this May at the Intermag Europe 2014 conference in Dresden, Germany, is a robust magnetic tape capable of storing a whopping 185 TBs of data.
The tape, developed by Sony in partnership with IBM, stores 148 GB per square inch, beating a record set in 2010 five times over. Creating such a robust data storage mechanism required the use of a special vacuum-forming technique called sputter deposition, which shoots argon ions at a polymer film substrate to produce tightly packed magnetic crystals measuring 7.7 nanometers, enough to fit three Blu-Rays worth of data on a single square inch of tape.
Magnetic tape-based storage and traditional hard disc-based storage have several advantages and disadvantages. While magnetic tape storage is a less-expensive and far more energy-efficient method of data storage, data retrieval is slower and extra complex. Because the tape is an analog device, data can only be sequentially accessed by moving the band into the precise position where it was placed. This may seem clunky in effect, but the storage method is far less susceptible to data degradation than HDD storage.
By contrast, hard disc drives use a sporadic function called random access that allows an object of data to be called forth from any coordinate in a population of addressable elements. To best illustrate these properties, imagine the magnetic-tape is a scroll that must be unfolded to read, whereas the HDD is a book that can be flipped to any section.
Sony has developed the technology as means of addressing the long-term industrial-sized data backups, where slow write times won’t pose a crippling problem. In a sense, the product consolidates a company’s digital assets into less hardware than it would take to use the costlier HDDs. In a sense, the product addresses the growing need for larger and less-expensive data storage as more and more data is produced. Analysts predict that by 2020, global storage will total approximately 40 trillion GB, at 5,200 GB per person. “The expansion of cloud services and the creation of new markets to utilize big data have led to a growing need for a data storage media which can store large amounts of information,” the company says.
Sony did not reveal when the tape is expected to hit the market, but it did reveal that its working on a more consumer-friendly storage product in conjunction with Panasonic, aimed for March 2015.
Via BBC
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