Image courtesy of US NOAA

Scientists in IBM's research labs in Zurich, in collaboration with Fujifilm, say they have extended the lifetime of tape as the preferred archival data storage medium by at least another 10 years. The team has achieved a new record in the amount of data that can be stored on tape.

"Our demo shows that tape - which is the greenest storage technology available today - is alive and will continue to be a cost-effective alternative to other storage technologies for at least another decade," IBM Fellow Evangelos Eleftheriou said in an IBM-produced video.

"Achieving 26.5 Gigabits per square inch means that the tape cartridge, which is approximately 10x2 centimeters in size, would hold up to 35 trillion bytes, or 35 terabytes of uncompressed data."

The team demonstrated the results by recording data onto a prototype tape, developed by Fujifilm.

Besides the dual-coat magnetic tape, based on barium ferrite particles, key technological enablers of the breakthrough were increased precision in control of read-write heads, new detection methods for better bit reading and a new read-write head.

The advance in controlling the heads increased the number of tracks written on a half-inch-wide tape by more than 25 times. Better accuracy achieved by the new detection methods enabled linear recording density to increase by 50 percent.

IBM Research Staff Member Mark Lanz said in the video that tape was greener for one simple reason: it is not in constant motion.

"Tape is a removable medium, so ... one or two tape drives can service a library of thousands of tapes and all of the tapes that are not being accessed don't consume any power. (In) the disk-based system, the disks are typically always spinning for reliability reasons. They're always consuming power."

IBM's next goal is to get closer to squeezing 100 Gigabits onto one square inch of tape.