8 million books onto a cartridge half the size of a VHS tape

[GomJabbar]

IBM has done it again. Here is the latest breakthrough on data storage.

IBM Develops New Tape Storage Technology

Scientists at IBM's Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif., planned to announce Tuesday that they have invented a process for stuffing 6.67 billion bits into a square inch of tape and 8 terabytes -- roughly 8 trillion bytes -- on a single cartridge. They contend that would be 15 to 20 times denser than today's industry-standard tape products.

[christopher_wolf]

Yup, I was reading that today; the days of tape are back!

You have tons of space for those backups, no matter how fast/slow/slower the tape backups take.

[egibbs]

So an alien comes to Earth and wants to record the entire body of human knowledge for study. Takes every book ever written and converts the characters to numeric codes (extended ASCII or something similar).

Strings them all together to make on great big long number that represents the sum total of all recorded information. Then it puts a . in front of the number to make it a decimal.

Now it takes a VERY precisely measured rod, and using a VERY precise measuring tool divides the rod in EXACTLY the ratio represented by the decimal, and makes a single mark.

Jumps in it's spaceship and takes off with everything ever written by humans encoded in one mark.

Ed Gibbs

[jdhurst]

Tapes have never really lost their "raison d'etre". I back up whole small business servers for clients with IBM's DLT tape drive. It is fast, reliable, although pricey. But at one client, the Exchange data base suffered a corruption (we know why (Symantec)) and I recovered the whole Exchange data base structure from tape flawlessly. There are other ways, but good sturdy tape technology isn't leaving anytime soon. ... JD Hurst

[GomJabbar]

....good sturdy tape technology isn't leaving anytime soon. ... JD Hurst

It shows what little I know. I would have thought that tape would have gone the way of the dodo by now. I mean, just look at musical 8-track tapes and cassette tapes!