128TB Tape Cartridges Being Built By IBM For SKA Radio Telescope

Here at CE, we have already informed you about the #-Link-Snipped-# and how #-Link-Snipped-# to provide the computing power to process the data coming in at a speed of 8 gigabytes per second. So finally it comes down to where will these enormous amounts of data be stored after processing? The answer to this question also lies with magnetic tapes. Special cartridges are being developed by IBM to hold up to 128TB of data. In normal cases these cartridges hold about 6TB of data, but on order to store more data the areal density of these tapes has to increase 10 times. IBM has already been able to store 29.6 GB of data per square inch of magnetic tape. In order to make it to 128TB the team is working on storing 100GB of data per square inch.

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Evangelos Eleftheriou from Storage Technologies Group of IBM's Zurich Research Laboratory has stated that since the SKA will generate 300 to 1500 petabytes of data per year and they will be using tape cartridges because they are more cost effective than storing data in hard disk drives.

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