14 DAY TRIAL // Magnetic tape used to be the rave at one point. Everything was on tape, from music tracks to films and even video proof in trials of law.
Though tape continues to be used heavily in enterprise environments even now, the medium fell into disfavor on all other layers of the IT market, after compact disks and, more recently, HDDs and SSDs completely blew the medium out of the water in terms of capacity, speed of recording and ease of use.
We might be looking at the second coming of tape recording though. Researchers from IBM and Fujifilm were somehow able to create a cassette tape, like the ones used to sell music, which can store 35TB of data.
That's much, much more than any DVD or Blu-ray drive, not to mention most USB flash drives. Eventually, 100 TB per cassette is expected to be attained. New Scientist advises against enthusiasm though. Only servers will use this sort of storage, for backup purposes. In fact, only the IBM computer that will run the Square Kilometre Array telescope will use these at first.