Researchers from IBM and Sony have broke a record by storing more data than ever before on a piece of magnetic tape. They were able store 201 gigabits per square inch, IBM announced today. That means a storage density of 20x more than currently commercially available products.
Ten years ago the maximum storage density was about 30x times lower than with the new technology. In 2014, IBM researchers broke their own record by storing 86 gigabits per square inch.
The innovation should make it possible to store 330 Terabytes on a cartridge that fits in the palm of a hand.
Magnetic tape were invented before the modern computing age, and are no longer used in consumer products. However, for large scale data storage, e.g. in video archives, magnetic tapes are still used. Also for backups and cloud storage they can be used.
IBM thinks that magnetic storage also the coming 10 years will continue to improve. Every 2 years it should be possible to double the storage density, according to IBM researcher Mark Lantz.
