Magnetic tape: The surprisingly retro way big tech stores your data

From household photos to particle physics data, we make stupendous amounts of integer accusation - and overmuch of it is stored connected old-fashioned integrative cartridges

Technology 13 December 2022

By Becca Caddy

A magnetic-tape thrust successful an bureau machine in the mid-1970s.

Hulton Archive/Getty Images

WE HUMANS are hoarders. We emotion to amass information. And these days, with integer retention astatine our fingertips, we stockpile ludicrous amounts of the stuff, whether it is connected hard drives astatine location oregon successful the cloud. You mightiness beryllium amazed to discover, however, that a hefty chunk of the accusation we are holding connected to contiguous – from backups of your emails and photos to particle collision information from the Large Hadron Collider – is stored not connected sleek hard drives, but connected clunky integrative cartridges containing coiled ribbons of magnetic tape.

That’s right, overmuch of the world’s information is stored connected portion – galore thousands of kilometres of the stuff. While that whitethorn induce nostalgia for those who are aged capable to retrieve making mixtapes and signaling songs disconnected the vigor to cassette, portion exertion has precocious enormously. So overmuch truthful that researchers contiguous are expanding its retention capableness astatine a complaint that outstrips its rivals.

Even portion has its limits, though. We are generating truthful overmuch information that yet it volition beryllium intolerable to store everything. Then what?

To beryllium clear, the portion we are talking astir present isn’t rather the aforesaid arsenic the cassettes that were erstwhile stacked precocious successful the bedrooms of children of the 1980s, adjacent if it is fundamentally the aforesaid technology. The quality is that old-fashioned cassette portion is analogue, whereas the mentation utilized for information retention contiguous is integer – meaning the accusation is stored successful zeroes and ones.

Better than hard drives

When IBM brought …