Possibility that cassette tape will return to mainstream of large capacity storage in the future

ByMarc Arsenault - Wow Cool

As a medium, there is already a sense of cassette tape that has been replaced by later generations such as CD. However, IBM's experts point out the possibility that cassette tapes will return as robust and dense media in the future as the data capacity increases at a speed faster than expected and the hard disk's density improvement approaches the limit It is.

Cassette tapes are the future of big data storage - tech - 19 October 2012 - New Scientist


In the stage of 2011When the information of the whole world is aggregated, the capacity becomes 295 exabytes, among which 94% are digitizedIt was. In other words, storage around the world is packed with about 280 exabytes of data.ExabyteThat is the unit above petabyte,By 2016 the traffic of the entire net will be exabyte grade or Zettabyte grade on itIt is supposed to be a strange unit far away from the far end.

Meanwhile, hard disks are mainly used in data centers, but Fujifilm and IBM in 2010By adopting barium ferrite magnetic material for magnetic tape, it is possible to develop a large capacity cartridge of 35 TB which is 44 times the current tape ratioDid. This magnetic tape is the world's largest telescope that actually starts building in 2016Square Kilometre Array (SKA)It is scheduled to be used in. When SKA starts to operate in 2024, the amount of compressed data to be spewed is expected to be 1 petabyte a day.

Antenna group forested over the central part of SKA, 5 km in diameter

By SKA Project Development Office and Swinburne Astronomy Productions

IBM's Evangelos Eleftheriou, who created the tape for SKA, said, "Every year the growth of archives is above expectations of decades." When the telescope comes online, Mr. Eleftherious improves the cartridge with his colleagues, shrinks the width of the recording track, makes it more precise positioning system for accessing the recording / reproducing head, so that it can store up to 100 TB of data I plan to. By using tape, energy consumption can be dramatically reduced.

A consultant of The Clipper Group(PDF file) Survey results released in 2010According to the data center using HDD, 200 times more energy than the same size tape library is required. This is because energy is required for keeping the platter rotated in case of HDD, whereas in the case of tape, energy is necessary only when reading and writing.

However, the downside of tape is slow access speed. This requires a mechanical mechanism to read the data, because you have to insert the part you want the tape to read into the reader and wind it to the correct point.

However, the linear method adopted in the above-mentioned large-capacity cartridge has been developed aiming at being comparable to HDD, and it is faster than the conventional tape.

Eleftheriou pointed out that HDDs will not be able to keep up as the need for storage grows so rapidly that the HDD density improvement is no longer enough to add platter, "Now is low It is when the superiority of tape media such as power consumption and low price survives. "

Just in September 2012 HGST willDeveloped technology that can increase the capacity without increasing the number of platter by filling the HDD with heliumThere are technological improvements on the HDD side as well, but it seems quite interesting if the tape media really regains hegemony. Indeed,There is also a tape library inside Google's data center that was released the other dayUntil saying "mainstream", the place of active activity may increase more than now.