Magnetic bands on the rise: data storage without Limit

almost 80 years Ago, could be magnetic tapes, soon to experience a Renaissance. Because there are in the world generates more data than hard drives can be stored. And while the storage density of magnetic hard drives hardly any increase, is bands, the capacity of the magnet is still far from exhausted. Scientists from the IBM research center in the Swiss Rüschlikon is managed jointly with Japanese researchers from the company Fujifilm, to increase the storage density of magnetic tapes in comparison to the commercially available tapes to thirty times.

Manfred Lindinger

editor in the Department “nature and science”.

F. A. Z.

While on a standard tape 20 terabytes of data space, can now be made on a palm-sized magnetic tape cassette, a data set of 580 terabytes of stored. This corresponds to the equivalent of a text quantity of 580 million books. Possible the progress was by a new band material. Instead of barium ferrite, the IBM researchers now use significantly smaller magnetic particles of strontium ferrite, which allow higher density.

cost-Effective storage for large amounts of data

in addition, the researchers have been able to increase the number of writable magnetic tracks is strong: more than 225,000 of the tracks are now on a one centimeter wide and around 1.3 Kilometer-long Band. Thus, a storage density of 317 gigabits per Inch2 is possible. However, the magnetic tapes will not displace the magnetic disks as quickly. The access times are still too slow and the storage capacity of the hard disk drives to large.

The magnetic tapes should therefore be continued, especially for large data centers, where there is large amounts of data and to archive in a cost-effective. Still, it is not to buy the magnetic memory. In order to transform the prototype into a marketable product, will still be a few years of development work necessary, according to the researchers.

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