Fuji is working on a huge magnetic tape drive for archival purposes.
But don’t hold your breath.
The 400TB beast isn’t expected to arrive until sometime close to 2030 and, even then, it’s not for us.
Even so, it does offer a glimpse into the advancements that storage technology is making and how that could trickle down into consumer and professional products over the coming years.
As PetaPixel points out, the two companies making tape drives these days are Sony and Fuji. While incredibly slow, you can put a lot of information on one hence why it is might be attractive for archival use. The standard is known as Linear-Tape Open with the current iteration being LTO-8 which can store 12TB of information.
The upcoming next-gen LT0-9 bumps that number up to 24TB. The website also quotes the site Blocks and Files which states that “current LTO formats all use magnetic tapes coated in Barium Ferrite (BaFe), but Fuji is proposing using Strontium Ferrite (SrFe) instead. Because SrFe is a smaller molecule with ‘superior properties’ to BaFe, this would allow for higher density storage on the same amount of tape.”
Interestingly, leaps in storage size are also often accompanied by jumps in file size as well. We’ve definitely seen that as more and more people are able to take high-quality photos and videos with something as simple as a smartphone.
What do you think of Fuji’s in-development 400TB archival drive? Does it sound like something you would want to have in your collection? What methods do you currently use to archive your photos? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.
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