History 2001: Fuji Promises 1TB per Tape Cartridge

After its ATOMM media technology, introduced in 1992 and applied to Zip disks as well as DLT and LTO cartridges, Fuji Photo Film has found something even better, the Nano Cubic technology.

Now, we can expect to attain 1TB of uncompressed capacity or 3GB on a floppy disk.

Nano Cubic uses an ultra-thin layer coating that is perfectly suited to MR heads. According to Fuji, it employs a precision coating process that can control thickness of the magnetic layer on a nanometer scale.

Two types of magnetic particles are used, both only tens of nanometers in size: acicular ferromagnetic alloy and tabular ferromagnetic hexagonal barium ferrite.

For dispersion, a special organic binder material allows the process to thoroughly disperse the particles on the coating solution so that a uniformly packed structure is achieved.

The beauty of the design is that Nano Cubic, according to Fuji , requires only small modifications to current coating equipment in order to arrive, ultimately, at a one-tenth thickness of ATOMM layers for 10x greater recording densities.

To integrate this new technology, the company is currently working with drive manufacturers, although it hasn’t yet revealed any names.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 167 on December 2001 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.