Tape could replace hard drives – in some cases – thanks to this breakthrough

Fujitsu has declared a new technology known as Digital Built-in File Technique that it claims could aid magnetic tape storage contend with tricky disk drives as a low-charge, significant ability storage alternate.

With the feud involving Sony and Fujitsu all around LTO fixed late past 12 months, all eyes are now on LTO-9, which is envisioned to be shipped in 2020. This iteration will provide capacities up to 26.1TB (uncompressed) and raw throughput of up to 708MB/sec.

Which is a better ability than the major tricky generate on the current market (at the moment 20TB) –  also more rapidly and probably less expensive much too. Increase in on-the-fly compression capabilities and, suddenly, it can be all seeking rosy for the venerable tape. 

Hacking the file procedure

Fujitsu’s Digital Built-in File Technique (VIFS) permits “multiple tape cartridges to be consolidated into one”, which usually means end users can accessibility information without worrying about specific tape cartridges.

It seems a very little like RAID but for tapes, which usually means that you can expect to probably require many tape drives or a tape library. This boundaries the item to company and significant businesses, where by storage calls for are generally calculated in Petabytes and Exabytes.

The Japanese organization promises to have improved the browse speeds by much more than fourfold in a person demo operate, although a further take a look at yielded a pace improvement of just about 2X.

“This technology permits substantial-pace tape accessibility effectiveness, this sort of as random reads and writes of several sizes transpiring in archive apps, and is envisioned to give a charge-effective information archiving infrastructure for long-term archiving of significant volumes of information,” Fujitsu added.