TAPE DRIVES HAVE sort of faded into the dark over the past few years as a backup medium, although many enterprise backup solutions still rely on them on a daily basis. The storage capacities of the various backup tape technologies haven’t really kept up with the development in the hard drive storage market and as such the largest backup tapes only hold about half as much data as today’s largest hard drives.

However, that is all set to change if IBM and Fujifilm have anything to say about it, as today the two have demonstrated a new type of backup tape technology that is estimated to be able to hold a whopping 35 Terabytes of data per cartridge. The press release claims this is about 44 times as much as IBM’s gen 4 LTO cartridges can store, since a gen 4 LTO cartridge fits 800GB. This is of course just a prototype at this stage, but it does show some interesting promise for the future of using tape as a backup solution.

The prototype tape has a storage density of 29.5 billion bits per square inch, which isn’t anywhere close to a modern PMR (Perpendicular Magnetic Recording) hard disk drive in terms of data density, as a PMR drive can pack 300-400 Gigabits per square inch. The important thing to take into consideration here though is the length of the tapes that are used. Keeping with IBM’s own comparisons, a standard LTO 4 tape is 820 meters long, that’s 32,283 inches, although the LTO 4 tape is also only 12.65mm wide, or just under half an inch, the same width as the prototype tape.

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