Cassettes that once blasted music from favorite singers just a few decades ago, and today only serve as scarecrows in some vineyards and orchards, are making a grand return to the ICT scene.
The IT professionals have concluded that these cassettes could be the best solution for storing the vast amounts of data being exchanged globally. Researchers from the Japanese company Fuji Film and IBM in Zurich, Switzerland, have already created a prototype of a cassette that can hold 35 terabytes of data. In other words, their cassette can store 35 million ‘book-like’ pieces of information on a ‘cartridge’ measuring 10 x 10 x 2 centimeters.
The true debut of this technology is likely to occur at the largest radio telescope, SKA (Square Kilometer Array), which will surround the southern hemisphere with its antennas. If it becomes operational in 2024, as planned, SKA will process a petabyte of compressed data per day, equivalent to one million gigabytes of data.
Current forecasts from the Consortium of Information Storage Industry indicate that in about ten years, a ‘hard drive’ could store three terabytes of data, but that will not be sufficient for the ever-increasing amount of information. If cassettes similar to those created by IBM and Fuji researchers are used for data storage, they say, costs and energy consumption will drastically decrease. Database systems based on ‘disc drives’, according to research by analysts from The Clipper Group, consume 200 times more energy than databases based on cassettes of similar size.
