Let's do a thought experiment.
Let's assume we just never got hard drives to work all that well, head crashes are common and large storage capacities are only possible in servers with incredibly expensive anti vibration setups and what not and there's no way they'd ever work in portable devices. And optical media just didn't work out. Maybe somehow we didn't discover the science in time and the companies working on it just failed or bad management decisions killed off the research into it before anything useful came off of it. And flash storage just never came down in price.
How far could we have pushed cassettes and tape if all the effort that went into other technologies had to be put into cassettes because there simply wasn't a good alternative for data storage. What are the limits of how fast we could move tape in a cassette? How miniaturized would the technology be by now in 2023? I know that there are contemporary tape backup systems with large capacities but there hasn't been any efforts into high speed seek times or making cassettes a viable tiny medium for use as removable media on PDAs or mobile phones.
If we could pack data densely enough and move the tape quickly enough how possible would modern computer tasks like high resolution digital video or image editing be? Assuming that we still had the high speed processors and non-persistent memory of the present but just no other data storage medium aside from magnetic tape.
For inspiration consider that in 1992 we had NT Cassettes that are about as big as an SD card an could store nearly a Gigabyte and in the enterprise LTO-9 tape (released in 2021) stores around 18 TB. So it doesn't sound impossible to have tiny cassettes with a lot of storage if we spend the last 3 decades working on it.
Tape is still used for backup in industry, the newest LTO-9 tapes can store 45TB compressed per cartridge.
I'm aware of the enterprise backup solutions as mentioned in the main post. Still 45 TB are very impressive. But I was just wondering how diverse and powerful tape could be if it was the only viable storage solution. I'm assuming high speed rewinding and seeking and miniaturization would be something that the industry would have put a lot of effort into in that case, but for backup solutions those properties are less important.
In May 2014, Fujifilm followed Sony and made an announcement that it will develop a 154 TB tape cartridge in conjunction with IBM, which will have an areal data storage density of 85.9 GBit/in² (13.3 billion bits per cm²) on linear magnetic particulate tape.
In December 2020, Fujifilm and IBM announced technology that could lead to a tape cassette with a capacity of 580 terabytes, using strontium ferrite as the recording medium.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic-tape_data_storage
https://techxplore.com/news/2020-12-fujifilm-ibm-unveil-terabyte-magnetic.html
But I don't think it is possible to achieve fast random access to different parts of the tape. The workaround would be having a ridiculous amount of RAM to cache loaded data.
I'm incredibly unqualified to even think about how one might get faster random access times but i was imagining sci-fi solutions like looped tape so that you are always at most 1/2 of the tape length away from the point you want to reach, or the tape equivalent of multi actuator hard drives where there's be multiple independent tapes in one cassette in a sort of RAID style thing but maybe instead of (only) striping data could be stored on multiple tapes in different places to always have one tape that is at a position close to the data you want. Or a system where the same tape has multiple read heads applied to it in distant places.
There are hard physical limits on tape; you can only make it so thin (ie; pack so much tape in a space) before it becomes too prone to snapping. You can only run it so fast before it becomes too prone to snapping. You can only change direction so fast before it snaps from the strain.
Fancy data storage and compression algorithms only get you so far. Barring ridiculous materials science advances for the substrate, I feel like the only real way to make it work would be to have massive amounts of RAM (probably battery-backed SRAM). Load the entire tape into a dedicated ramdisk and use it more or less the same way we use USB media now; data transfer that you have to safely eject (write back all changes).
Okay, your other comments have actually got me thinking. So, instead of a hard disk with a rotating platter and moving head like a record, you could have maybe, a tape-loop cylinder and head that moves laterally along the rotational axis. Kinda like a really big, fast 8-track. With IDK, maybe nanoscale carbon as a substrate.
sneakernet still beats data transmission tbh. Also didn't tape get us to the moon?
