At just pennies per gigabyte, breakthrough could lead to new applications for tape.
IBM scientists have demonstrated an areal recording density of 123 billion bits of uncompressed data per square inch on low cost, particulate magnetic tape, a breakthrough which represents the equivalent of a 220 terabyte tape cartridge that could fit in the palm of your hand.
To put this into perspective, 220 terabytes of data is comparable to 1.37 trillion mobile text messages or the text of 220 million books, which would require a 2,200 km (1,400 miles) bookshelf spanning from Las Vegas to Houston, Texas.