back to article IBM claims new areal density record with 220TB tape tech

IBM and FUJIFILM have demonstrated new technologies they say crams 123 billion bits into every square inch of tape, to deliver a 220 terabyte (probably LTO) tape cartridge. The two companies say they've pulled off this trick with something called NANOCUBIC technology that “decreases barium ferrite (BaFe) magnetic particle …

  1. This post has been deleted by its author

    1. Peter Gathercole Silver badge

      Re:HSM

      Yes, its true that HSM has been around for ages, but it's much better integrated now, with the arrival a few years ago of LTFS, which enables the tapes to be standalone (file metadata is stored on the tape with the files themselves) and portable between systems while still being able to form part of an HSM solution.

      It's actually quite a cool innovation, if you can work out how to use it.

      Of course, it does not prevent you using recent generation LTO tapes and drives as raw data storage under the control of, say, TSM.

      1. This post has been deleted by its author

  2. Jan 0 Silver badge

    15 years?

    Why do we have to wait for 15 years from demonstration to product? Instead of tinkering away and producing tiny improvements in mass manufacture, why not concentrate on introducing LTO12 in 2 or 3 years time? I want a 220TB tape cartridge and I want it now! Is everything held back by marketing departments? How about a drive using 8 x 16 Gb/s heads to fill the tape in about 2 hours? Many of us could go back to feeding the drive every day instead of using a tape library. Even better, let's have a longer tape in a bigger cartridge, which we change weekly or monthly.

    To put it another way, what makes "Moore's law" perform so badly?

    1. ibmzrl

      Re: 15 years?

      Actually the wait is due to you the user. We need to make the tape backwards compatible for two generations and if you jump from 10 TB to 220 TB this isn't possible. The technology from the latest demo will trickle out to make pieces at a time.

  3. Alan Brown Silver badge

    Backwards compatibility is vastly overrated

    Every lto purchase I've made has been a 3 generation hop.

    Most people who use large scale lto deployments are in the same boat - you buy a robot with drives and 5 year support. At the end of that period you buy a new one as maintenance past that point is more expensive than buying.

    Data migration if needed streams from old tape to disk to new tape. After that theyre burned. We don't bother migrating backups. Just keep the old kit around until the tapes expire then chuck the lot.

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