As a population, we're creating more data than ever before: estimates say 90 per cent of the world's data was created in the last two years.
A data expansion at this rate requires new ways to store it. Computer scientists at IBM and Sony's division for data storage have now managed to fit 330 terabytes of uncompressed data onto a small cartridge that can be held in the hand.
Read more: A movie, operating system and Amazon gift card have been stored in DNA
To put this figure into context, this is 330,000 gigabytes or 330,000,000 megabytes. In a slightly more understandable metric, this is roughly equivalent to 330 million books.
The cartridge also comes with a new world record for the amount of data that can be stored on a surface area. The record sees 201 gigabits per square inch being stored on a piece of magnetic tape.
“Tape has traditionally been used for video archives, backup files, replicas for disaster recovery and retention of information on premise, but the industry is also expanding to off-premise applications in the cloud,” IBM's Evangelos Eleftheriou said in a statement.
The record was announced in Japan at the 28th Magnetic Recording Conference. Eleftheriou continued to explain that as magnetic tapes – first invented in the 1960s – continue to develop, they'll become more practical for use in the cloud.
In creating the new tape-based storage, IBM used its reading and writing technology with Sony's latest tape. It's expected that when the new kind of cartridge is commercially produced it will be more expensive than current offerings, but still competitively priced.
Despite the breakthrough, Eleftheriou says storage on magnetic tapes will continue to "scale up" for another ten years. The technology is the latest in a number of novel techniques being developed to hold data in the future.
In March it was revealed scientists from the New York Genome Center and Columbia University have been able to store more data on DNA than ever before. "DNA has the potential to provide large-capacity information storage," Yaniv Erlich and Dina Zielinski said about their work at the time.
The DNA storage method saw six files being encoded into the DNA: these included an operating system, the film Arrival of a train at La Ciotat, a $50 Amazon gift card, a virus, a Pioneer plaque, and a 1948 academic paper. However, the method wasn't able to hold much data. In total 2,146,816 bytes was stored in the DNA – this was an increase of 60 per cent on the previous DNA data storage record, however.
Separately, academics at Duke University have created a form of "spray-on" memory. Chemists behind the project used an aerosol jet printer and nanoparticle inks to create a material capable of storing data that is also incredibly flexible. The chemists behind the project say the method, if adapted for mass and commercial use, could be used to store digital information on groceries, pill bottles, clothing and more.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
