Magnetic tape was once considered an extremely popular storage device for individual users in the 80s and 90s. By the dawn of the 21st century, magnetic tape fell into decline as newer storage devices emerged that made them too slow for most individual users. Therefore, many people think that it has been “disappeared”, today’s young generation does not even know the existence of this type of storage device.
However, magnetic tape today remains a useful and long-term backup solution for many organizations and businesses thanks to its ability to store large amounts of data on relatively small devices.
But recent advances in storage technology allow magnetic tape to store large amounts of data, up to hundreds of gigabytes per square inch.
In fact, some technology companies never stopped developing magnetic tape technology. IBM is one of them, the company recently introduced its latest magnetic and tape drives, with high storage capacity of up to 50TB of uncompressed data per tape cartridge, if compressed at a ratio of 3 :1, storage capacity will expand up to 150TB. This figure, which is more than double that of previous models, will help cloud storage providers and other enterprise customers store huge amounts of data more efficiently.
IBM’s new magnetic tape drive called the TS1170 is created using Strontium Ferrite magnetic particles.
Not only capable of storing large data, the TS1170 drive also manages native data speeds of 400 MB/s, increasing to 900 MB/s when processing compressed data.