Though backup tape seems antiquated, tape technology has adapted well to modern computing environments. Consider that those reel-to-reel tapes in 1980s computer rooms held 240 feet of ½-inch tape on 10.5" reels. Nine tracks of data stored a then-impressive 100 megabytes of data traveling at 1.2 mb per second. Compare them to the LTO-4 tapes in use today. Within a 4" square cartridge, 2,600 feet of ½-inch tape is divided into 896 tracks and holds 800 gigabytes of information traveling at 120 mb per second.
That’s 100 times as many tracks, 100 times faster data transfer and 8,000 times greater data storage capacity. Clearly, tape is a remarkable technology that’s seen great leaps in speed and capacity. The LTO-5 format arriving any day will natively hold 1.6 terabytes of data at a transfer rate of 180 mb per second. Still, there are those pesky laws of physics. Time is our principal adversary when dealing with tape.
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