IBM shatters tape storage record

IBM has announced a new technique for storing data on magnetic tape that increases the capacity of the media by up to 15 times.

Researchers at IBM's Almaden Research Centre in California managed to cram 6.67 billion bits onto each square inch of tape, a dramatic improvement on current techniques.

In time the team expects to be able to store eight terabytes of information on a tape half the size of a video cassette.

"This demonstration confirms IBM's continued leadership in magnetic tape technology," said Spike Narayan, senior manager of advanced technology concepts at IBM Almaden.

"This is a major milestone in our programme and gives magnetic tape the density boost that we gave hard-disk drives in the 1990s."

The researchers made the breakthrough by using a new kind of double sided tape developed by Fuji, and a new kind of recording head developed for use with micro-drives.

IBM's first commercial tape product, the 726 Magnetic Tape Unit, was announced 54 years ago next week. It used reels of half-inch wide tape that each had a capacity of a mind-boggling 2MB.