CRITICAL ENVIRONMENTS
comes close to storing the amount of data you can store on tape . We ' re talking pennies per gigabyte .”
While tape technology from earlier decades certainly couldn ’ t stand up to modern storage drives in terms of capacity , modern tape reels are the products of years of intensive research and development . “ What I love about good engineers is that they ' re like the divers in the Olympics . You watch diving and you think ' well gosh , that looks pretty simple - I bet anyone could do that ', and then you try to do three and a half somersaults and it turns into the world ' s worst belly flop ,” laughs Walls . Aside from avoiding an embarrassing case of metaphorical pinkbelly , IBM ’ s engineers have spent the last three decades turning the humble tape cartridge into a modern engineering marvel .
The latest generation , powered by IBM ’ s LTO Ultrium 9 technology will hit the market in H1 of this year , and be capable of holding 45 terabytes of compressed data in a block of plastic about the size of a CD case . “ If you looked at one of our tape reels with your naked eye , it would look a lot like the cassette tape reels of yesteryear .
But if you look closer , probably under a microscope , the medium has changed radically , in terms of thickness and the number of magnetic bits that can be stored and retrieved , it ' s far , far greater than you would see on a classic cassette ,” Walls explains . In December , IBM broke the world record for tape density , cramming 317 gigabits into every square inch of a new prototype strontium ferrite particulate magnetic tape .
114 April 2021