Hitachi Maxell, Ltd. and Tokyo Institute of Technology today jointly announced the collaboratively development of ultra high capacity tape media featuring a capacity of over 50 TB per standard tape cartridge. This joint team demonstrated a world-record areal density of 45.0 Gb/in2 in linear formatted perpendicular magnetic recording media. This technology enables a capacity of more than 50 TB per standard tape cartridge - 33 times larger than the capacity of the latest available LTO Ultrium 5 data cartridges.

The coating type media, which is made by coating the magnetic powder on the base film, is commonly used for archive in public libraries, public records offices and the long-term storage. In order to increase the capacity of these type of media developers had to create an ultra-thin film with magnetic particles sized below 10nm. This was very difficult to achieve using coating methods.

Hitachi's super-high density nanometer-sized magnetic film was developed by combining Maxell?s tape medium design/evaluation technologies and a new thin-film formation method (Facing Targets Sputtering method), developed by associate professor Shigeki Nakagawa et al.in the Tokyo Institute of Technology. The method allowed Hitachi to make a large-capacity magnetic tape with ultra-small magnetic particles (less than 10nm). As a result, the areal recording density of the new tape medium reached the 45.0 Gb/in2. Using this film in typical data tape cartridge media offers a capacity of 50TB per cartridge or even more.

Hitachi confirmed a linear recording density of 531 kbpi and a track pitch of 300 nm without cross-track interference using a newly designed tester.

Hitachi will present these developments at the 9th Perpendicular Magnetic Recording Conference (PMRC 2010; May 17 - 19, 2010, Sendai, Japan).