death of the cassette tape exaggerated - power storage devices

London -
The gap between the amount of data generated by the world and the ability to store data is growing, which brings new vitality to the humble cassette tape.
Although consumers have abandoned the audio box and switched to the ubiquitous iPod, organizations with large amounts of data, from patient records to capacity --
Hungry video archives continue to use tape as a cheap and secure storage medium.
IBM researchers are trying to keep these 60-
The technology has been in use for at least the next decade, and they are getting help from rising energy costs, forcing companies to look for cheaper alternative sources of energy
Hungry hard drive
Evangelos Eleftheriou of IBM Research in Zurich, Switzerland and his colleagues have developed a 10 cm by 2 cm cassette tape that can hold about 35 tb of data, equivalent to a library with 400 km bookshelves.
"This is really the greenest storage technology," Eleftheriou told Reuters . ".
"The still tape consumes almost zero power.
"Unlike hard disk storage devices, tape systems consume only power when reading or recording data, while hard disk storage devices must be turned on continuously, giving them a carbon footprint that is only a fraction of their disc size
Based on peers.
Delay is the biggest drawback.
Tape is usually retrieved via a robot selector and then loaded into the read device.
But for most of the archived data in the world, access time is not important.
From legal files and company records kept in compliance with legislation such as the USA's Sabans Oakley act, to data on traffic flows and weather patterns, it is more important to keep a safe copy than to have instant access.
"If you have big data, then you have a real big backup," says Eleftheriou . ".
The estimate by consulting firm Coughlin Associates confirms this, that is, about 400 aibytes, equivalent to 20 million times the content of the Library of Congress, which is currently stored on tape.
Originally developed with Fujifilm, there were about 29 new IBM boxes.
5 billion square inches (6. 452cm²)
Use the adhesive tape of the coating made of chemical compound ferrite acid lithium to maximize
Called linear density
The amount of data that can be compressed to the length of the tape.
Another limitation is the number of tracks that can be laid, and researchers have developed new nano-positioning techniques that can position the reader with a precision of 10 to 15 billion meters.
SKA Eleftheriou and his team believe they can increase storage to 100 billion bits per square inch, which they hope will make tape storage one of the largest data collection projects in the world
A huge radio telescope called a Square Kilometer Array (SKA).
In just over 10 years, SKA will start scanning the sky from two remote areas in South Africa and Australia, and it will generate 10 times the global Internet data traffic.
"There will be a lot of data flowing out of a giant computer that essentially has a few metals [
Dishes and antennas
"Finally," said Andy Faulkner, an astronomical physicist at the University of Cambridge and one of the SKA project engineers.
Faulkner said that the use of hard disks in astronomy has changed considerably in recent years, because their capacity has grown so far and is fast, but SKA will be the most important thing for another pot of fish is that it will generate a lot of data and limit the use of electricity from its remote location.
"In fact, no one knows at 10-
But tape storage is very interesting because you don't need to have real-time access to everything.