History 2003: US Consortium to Increase Tape Capacity to 33TB

The Advanced Technology Program, part of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, is sponsoring a project entitled Multi-Terabyte Tape Storage with the goal of attaining native capacity of 33TB in the current standard of tape cartridge compared to 500GB today – using large angle azimuth recording and shingle writing.

With the new recording technique, the bits are written at a large positive angle in one direction and a large negative angle in the opposite. Furthermore, the write element is much wider than the data track width and overwrites a portion of the previously written track. The magnetic tape will implement sputtered metal film on flexible polymeric substrate. The drive will use helix-coil write and GMR heads.

This project, with a price tag of $24 million, to be completed by October 2006, has received $12 million in financing from the ATP.

It is headed by media maker Imation, with others participants including Accutronics, a licensee of LTO technology, tape head maker Advanced Micro-Sensors – a newcomer to the consortium – Advanced Research Corp., an R&D laboratory for magnetic technology and Peregrine Recording Technology. Additional support comes from Carnegie Mellon University, Ohio State University, and University of California San Diego.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 189 on October 2003 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.