News Fujifilm's New Tape Can Store 580TB of Data on One Cartridge

[Admin]

IBM and Fujifilm set to produce world's densest magnetic tape cartridges.

Fujifilm's New Tape Can Store 580TB of Data on One Cartridge : Read more

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

If Sony would only make a Consumer Tape Backup Drive Format using famous older Tape Cassette Formats as a basis.

Maybe borrow some of the good ideas from DCC (Digital Compact Cassette)

And have 3 sizes (Small, Medium, Large) ranging from <DCC, Elcaset, VHS>

Then you can target Consumer, Small Business, & Enterprise with cheaper machines that can backup lots of data.

LTO's biggest disadvantage is that it's a single Spindle Cassette which creates a whole hosts of challenges while the most popular consumer formats always had 2 Spindles in each Cassette.

 

[USAFRet]

If Sony would only make a Consumer Tape Backup Drive Format using famous older Tape Cassette Formats as a basis.

There was a very short lived attempt of using VHS as a data backup platform.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArVid

In the 90s Your Spare VHS Could Be a Backup Hard Drive

A very clever system, hypothetically.

www.popularmechanics.com

"... transfer rate of 9 MB per minute. "

 

[mras]

It's all good theory, but pratical not so much.
A VHS tape of 5 hours playtime, could store upwards 2GB when i examined it, in 2000~(which by that time, still was alot, but transfer speeds was like USAFred said.. SLOW.
A Minidisc can store 120MB
A casette tape can store about 4MB

The article itself, says it all; its all about medium; there have been plenty of progression from the 1980 casette tapes.
or to quote the article:

Just like with hard drives, the right magnetic layer is only a part of the equation. Positioning read/write heads over 56.2-nm wide tracks on a tape that is streamed at a speed of approximately 15 km/h is challenging. To do so, IBM and Fujifilm developed a low friction tape head technology that can position its ultra-narrow 29nm-wide TMR read sensor at an accuracy of 3.2nm.

Now remember those accuracy has to last for 30 years+.
It's no small steps done.

Also physical sizes is about what fits in current gear. LTO is made to fit inside a 5.25" slot at its tiniest place; Making them smaller would mean less storage/more expensive pr carddige pr MB/no clear benefiths over QLC+/HDD's. Making them larger would mean they need to develop a new supplychain of devices/infrastructure/robots/cabinets/etc. It's no small feat.

An LTO doesn't have multiple spindles, because, there is just one tapestream.
Instead they have 32+(LTO7 or later) tracks that can be read by each read/write element.
With 3584 tracks on each tape, it therefor still requires 112 rounds before you fill entire tape.
Also, the transferspeeds of tapes is quite good; 300MB/sec for uncompressed data at LTO7.
Finaly LTO has a RFID tag on them, that can be used much smarter with "offline" storage, unparallel to what 'offline' hdds/ssds offers.

So, yes, it take's some time to seak a tape, approx a minute, but for its intended usage, tape's other superioritys simply outshine the alternatives.