Did You Know? Tape Technology at 50

Bits & bytes about tape technologies
Imation has shipped nearly 30 million servo-written half-inch tape cartridges to date.

There is potentially 40-80 (depending on drive used) petabytes of data stored on 3590E tape cartridges in the market. Imation has shipped over two million cartridges since 3590E technology was developed and launched in February 2000.

What's a petabyte? A petabyte is equal to 1000 terabytes. A terabyte is equal to the number of human heartbeats on the earth every 2.4 minutes!

Media coercivity is defined as the field strength required to change the magnetic state of magnetic material, expressed in oersteds — higher coercivity allows for higher tape capacity.

Legacy tape technologies are based on iron oxide or chromium dioxide magnetic particles. Today's higher capacity tape formulations make use of magnetic particle technology commonly known as Metal Particulate or MP (MP2, MP3, etc.) technology.

High capacity tape media is made using polyester films such as PEN (polyethylene naphthalate) or PET (polyethylene tereohthalate) as base substrates, depending on required characteristics for the cartridge. PEN is also used in high performance sailcoths for racing and PET is used to make soft drink bottles!

In 1952, Imation, as part of 3M, launched the world's first computer tape. The round-reel tape was used in IBM's 726 model drive and stored 1MB of data. Today, Ultrium/LTO cartridges store 100,000 times more data!