Tape drives are an ancient and very inexpensive method of storing large amounts of data. They are no longer common among private individuals, but they still have an important target group in large companies: A tape cartridge costs significantly less than a hard disk drive of the same size. The most important feature of such a cassette is its capacity – this is currently a maximum of 12 TByte uncompressed.

Researchers from the IBM research center near Zurich now gave an outlook on the future of technology. This is quite similar to that in hard disks – with one important difference: While the disks in hard disks are rigid, tape drives must store the data on a with up to 15 km / h save the very thin tape running past. The storage density of the current tapes is still far below that of hard disks, there is still plenty of room for capacity increases.

More stability, different material Various measures are necessary for a tape drive with more than 500 TB. The tape run, for example, has to be stabilized: If the tape wanders less up and down when reading or writing, the tracks can be made thinner and thus the track density increased. The track density can be increased with another magnetic material, for example, instead of the barium ferrite currently used, the researchers are relying on strontium ferrite for the future.

A piece of tape with an area of ​​

is used in the laboratory to store a bit , 2 nm width and 56, 2 nm high. If you include a little security, you get a storage capacity of 317 GBit per square inch. Together with even thinner and therefore longer tapes, the researchers want to achieve a tape capacity of around 580 Tbytes. However, it is still unclear when such capacities will actually be available on the market. INSIC, the industry standardization organization, has the value of 220 GBit per square inch already for the year 2030 noted. For comparison: The disks in high-capacity hard drives have a storage density of more than 1 TBit per square inch.

Tape is not only used as an archive Tape drives and tapes are not only used for archiving. Alberto Pace, the storage manager of the nuclear research center CERN, said at the IBM event that CERN is currently on 3000 servers with 70. 000 Hard disks around 220 hold PByte data. However, the amount of data on tapes is greater: On the currently 30. 000 Tapes are stored round 360 PByte research data. The researchers can access these as well, only a little more slowly.

A large part of the data comes from experiments with the LHC. According to Pace, these generated around 2018 around 115 PByte data, the November 2018 keeps with 15, 8 PByte the record. When it comes to data storage, CERN will continue to use tape, he said. (ll)