Here’s why tape will always surpass hard drives and SSDs in storage

The petabyte era is on the horizon (at least in compressed form)

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SonyandFujifilmare locked in a battle for tape supremacy, with the latter revealing it’s preparing for tape media with an areal density of 224Gbit per square inch, which translates to a real life capacity of around 400TB.

Fujifilm - which has just announced its firstTape-as-a-Serviceoffering - is betting on Strontium Ferrite (SrFe) as opposed to the popular Barium Ferrite, which is used in most LTO tapes, the capacity of which currently top 12TB (uncompressed) or 30TB (compressed using an industry ratio of 2.5:1).

LTO-8 will make way for LTO-9 later this year and, with the last four LTO generations shipped over the past six years, one can expect the next four (LTO-10, LTO-11, LTO-12 and LTO-13) to be available by 2026 (depending on market conditions).

Tape supremacy

At 384TB, a single LTO-13 tape is likely to be the single biggest unit of storage in the world, far outclassing hard disk drives (with capacities stalling, having grown by only 2TB per generation) and solid state drives, which reached100TBin 2018 and then stopped growing.

Tape capacity increase exponentially (essentially doubling every generation) while SSD and HDD tend to grow linearly. It would take a very bold person indeed to bet against LTO being the first media to reach 1PB (that’s one million Gigabyte).

The biggest issue with tape has to do with accessing the right file, which is why it is seen as an archiving media above all. Transfer rates are unlikely to be an issue, with LTO-13 likely to surpass 16Gbps, but that still means you will need at least a day to fill one up, especially if the tape length surpasses 1,000m.

ViaAnandTechandBlocks and Files

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Désiré has been musing and writing about technology during a career spanning four decades. He dabbled inwebsite buildersandweb hostingwhen DHTML and frames were in vogue and started narrating about the impact of technology on society just before the start of the Y2K hysteria at the turn of the last millennium.

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