Fujifilm said Tuesday that it had begun shipping a 5 terabyte magnetic tape for use in a computer data tape drive system from Oracle.
Fujifilm said the cartridge, for use in Oracle's StorageTek T10000C drive, boasts the world's largest capacity for a magnetic tape cartridge and the fastest transfer rate at 240 megabytes per second.
The cartridge will use barium ferrite-based magnetic tape to store data. Ahead of other tape manufacturers, Fujifilm has advanced the development of BaFe Particles and BaFe Tape to achieve large capacity and high performance in long-term achievability resulting in the industry's largest tape cartridge.
Magnetic Tape uses magnetic particles as a recording medium. For further capacity expansion, it is necessary to micrify each particle size to increase the recording density. Today, Metal Particle (MP) tape is the most popular among the Magnetic Tape market. With Metal Particle, it is very difficult to maintain coercivity when micrifying its particle size. This means it is extremely difficult to further expand the tape capacity using Metal Particles. On the other hand, BaFe Particle could expand the tape capacity dramatically without losing its excellent magnetic properties such as high coercivity, high frequency and lower noise compared with Metal Particle.
Moreover, Fujifilm has advanced its unique NANOCUBIC technology to achieve ultra-smooth thin magnetic layer by coating micrified BaFe Particles uniformly which rapidly increased the storage areal density resulting in the storage capacity of 5TB. This capacity is more than three times the data capacity when compared with 1.5TB LTO Ultrium5 data cartridge and five times the data capacity when compared with 1.0TB StorageTek T10000B tape.
The new StorageTek T10000C Tape Cartridge using BaFe particles can be archived for more than 30 years, according to the company. Since BaFe Particle is oxide and chemically stable, its magnetic characteristics do not degrade over time under varying storage environments. Moreover, by creating micro asperity evenly on the ultra-smooth tape surface, a higher durability level was achieved. And by modifying a mechanical cartridge component, cartridges can be loaded and unloaded for more than 25,000 cycles, further extending the cartridge durability.