Record Capacity of 330TB on Tape Cartridge

15th August 2017

Sony Corporation developed, in collaboration with IBM Research, located in Zurich, Switzerland, a magnetic tape storage technology with the industry’s highest recording areal density for tape storage media, at 201Gb/in².

This achievement was made possible by bringing together Sony’s new magnetic tape technology employing lubricant with IBM Research – Zurich’s newly developed write/read heads, advanced servo control technologies and signal-processing algorithms.

The recording areal density of 201Gb/in² is approximately 20x greater than conventional magnetic tape storage media (9.6Gb/in²). The resulting technology can support high-capacity storage of approximately 330TB per cartridge, whereas conventional technology can only handle 15TB per data cartridge.