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In 1951, the first mass-produces computer, Universal Automatic Computer (UNIVAC) was shipped to the United States Census Bureau and used tape storage. Today some people regard tape storage as old storage but it has been paid attention in the recent big data era. Therefore we will introduce the improvement of the recording capacity of tape storage.

Beginning of Tape Storage

As mentioned above, the world’s first commercial recording magnetic tape was born from UNIVAC (now Unisys). In 1956 the first hard disk storage also appeared but it had not been practical yet in terms of capacity or power consumption. Thus, tape storage was the most focused on in the other storage devices.

[1980’s / Megabyte Era] 3480, TK50

3480’s capacity: 200MB per cartridge.
In the 1980’s the disk storage market expanded due to HDD technological innovation and tape storage was mainly used for data backup and archiving. However this environmental change led to new evolution of tape storage such as 3480 made by IBM or TK50 made by DCE (now HPE).

[1990’s / Gigabyte Era] DLT, DAT, AIT

DLT Ⅳ’s capacity: 40GB per cartridge.
In the 1990’s the market environment for tape storage became increasingly severe. With the spread of personal computers, the HDD market expanded because of the rapid increase in capacity and price reduction. On the other hand, tape storage also was required to have larger capacity, lower cost and higher speed. Then DLT, DAT and AIT had been widely used.

[2000’s~ / Terabyte Era] LTO

LTO-7’s capacity: 6TB per cartridge.
In the 2000’s, there was a movement to establish an industry-wide open format in order to solve the compatibility problem with the tape standards and formats of each company. Then, HP, IBM, and Seagate (now Quantum) jointly developed LTO (Linear Tape-Open). LTO was tested for compatibility between companies and indicated Long-term roadmap.

[Future Possibilities]

Today LTO has published Roadmap to the LTO G12 (192TB) as a right picture. Even when it has been 68 years since its debut, tape storage innovation still continues. Please keep your eyes on tape storage’s development.