I’ve been using computers long enough to appreciate the economic value of data storage that we see today. My first experience with computers at home relied on tape drives to store programs and data. I still remember getting upset with my brother who took one of my computer storage cassette tapes and recorded over my homework with whatever the latest song on the radio was.
For those that don’t recall the cassette tape, the different common “sizes” at the time were 15-, 30-, 60-, and 90-minute tapes. Yes, they were commonly measured in minutes because at the time tapes were predominantly used for audio purposes. These tape lengths resulted in an approximate data storage capacity of… wait for it… 1.6kb per minute. So, a 15-minute tape could store about 24kb per side. Yup, kilobytes.
Fast forward to today and we have gigabytes of data storage available in flash drives that are smaller and faster. With access to cloud storage, we have, essentially, unlimited capacity at a relatively speaking, low cost. However, the data still must physically reside somewhere, right?
Mainframe computer stalwart, IBM, has announced the next generation of tape drives with their TS1170 drive. The TS1170 has an uncompressed capacity of 50TB and with compression can store up to 150TB. There are a variety of features built into the drive that allow for high-speed data transfer for storage and access.
In my youth, I was thrilled when I could afford a computer that had a floppy drive (hard drives were still way outside my budget) and I thought I was done with tape drives. However, the size of data has grown beyond what many predicted, and data storage has evolved a lot over the last several years and decades and tape drives. What do you think will be the next advancement in storage?
