Hard drives and solid-state storage may dominate personal computers, but contrary to popular belief, tape backups are as alive as ever. Over the past few years, this medium has seen notable capacity improvements, and its latest leap comes from IBM, which managed to pack just over 14 gigabytes in six square centimeters of tape, about 220 terabytes inside a simple cartridge.
Though I love retrocomputing, there are some things I'm happy to have left behind, and one of them is using audio cassettes to store data. They were slow, had to be handled with care, and calibrating the datasette head was tedious. I admit I got more fun out of them than expected (between a bootleg of Giana Sisters and Microprose Soccer, I had a blast), but floppy disks were more than welcome. Now, magnetic storage has left the general market, but on the server side, it has only improved its capacity. With the arrival of "the cloud", its virtues became a vital resource for many companies that handle and store massive volumes of information. In May 2014, Fujifilm and Sony announced a 154-terabyte cartridge (uncompressed), which in theory will be available by the end of the year. Today it's IBM's turn, which with the help of Fujifilm managed to push that limit to 220 terabytes.
This development is all the more impressive when you consider the origins of magnetic tape storage. IBM dates its discovery to 1952, with reels that could hold two megabytes (!) of data. In 2006, the maximum capacity in prototype cartridges was eight terabytes, and in less than a decade it has multiplied 27 times. Of course, getting here wasn't easy. The latest update from IBM and Fujifilm has required a considerable boost in head control, whose position must be regulated within just six nanometers. Track density reaches 181,300 per inch, 39 times more than LTO6 offers today.
The best part is that tape storage seems to be following its own "Moore's law", doubling its capacity every two years. I imagine it will hit an upper limit sooner or later, but until that moment arrives, the cloud is delighted. Deep storage, high density, optimized search speeds, and low cost are four things that sound great these days, although IBM hasn't given any solid date for commercial products with this new technology...
