Big Blue to bring back magnetic tape

BIG FIRM IBM is getting all retro and is planning to bring back magnetic tape into the mainstream.

Boffins at the company's Almaden Research Center and at Fuji Photo have been experimenting with a new form of dual sided magnetic tape.

Of course it can hold a bit more data than the old reel-to-reel jobs. The new-fangled tape can manage 6.67 billion bits of data per square inch. According to Big Blue that is about 15 times more than the magnetic tape which is apparently still being used by serious storage people.

IBM's department of working out what that all means in terms that the layman understands, says that will mean that one cartridge, half the size of a video tape will hold enough data to store the contents of eight million books housed in a library 57-miles long. Which would certainly mean a packed lunch if you wanted to see the librarian to get your book stamped.

The new sort of tape, which could hit the shops in about five years, sports a thin layer of barium ferrite crystals dispersed uniformly over its surface.

The plus side is that Barium ferrite does not corrode or change chemically over time, making it good for long-term storage. Tape systems do not burn up as much electricity as hard drives either. µ

L'INQ
Cnet