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US storage giant Western Digital already covers SSDs, memory cards, RAM and hard drives and has delved into DNA data storage (it’s a founding member of the DNA Data Storage Alliance).
Now, newly unearthed patents seem to show that the company may be looking to (re)add tape to complete its current media portfolio after the sunset of its Arkeia product range a few years ago.
The company has recently been awarded a number of patents stating “tape embedded drive” in recent years:
- 11393498 (pdf) (head mount with hanger for a tape-embedded drive)
- 20200258544 (pdf) (Embedded Tape Drive)
- 11081132 (pdf) Integrated tape drive with HDD components
- And a few more
This refers to the intriguing possibility of merging the basic components of a tape drive with the actual tape media in an effort to reduce the inherent environmental and technological complexity of tape libraries and improve access time by at least an order of magnitude.
Having the read and write heads closer to the media in a closed form factor is nothing new. That’s what hard drives do and what others, especially Iomega with its Zip Drive, have tried to do in the past. Western Digital’s patent proposes adopting a standardized form factor, 2.5-inch or 3.5-inch, for easier adoption by data centers and hyperscalers.
The cost factor
An embedded tape would still be more expensive than a regular one (LTO-9 tapes cost about $130 a pop) because of the extra electronics, but you don’t need a tape drive to get started. As long as it’s somewhere between tapes ($4 per TB) and business hard drives ($20 per TB), there will be a sizable market for it.
A standard LTO (Linear Tape-Open) tape is 102 x 105 x 21 mm, while your average 3.5-inch hard drive is about 147 x 101 x 26 mm and weighs about a quarter the weight. LTO-9 has a compressed capacity of 45TB (18TB uncompressed) and the next generation – likely to appear in the second half of this decade – will double in capacity (obviously there may be some adjustments, as was the case with the transition from Gen 8 to gen 9).
A sealed LTO-based tape drive is likely to be lighter, cheaper, consume/dissipate less power, but also have more built-in computing capabilities than your standard hard drive. Thicker and wider tape reels would also allow for much greater capacities (LTO-9 uses 1 km tape with a thickness of 5.2 µm and a width of 12.65 mm).
Western Digital is in a unique position to turn this into a workable reality, especially as it can leverage its expertise in hard drive components. That new tape, all things considered, could use a similar circuit board and interface as a corporate hard drive; it doesn’t have to have the traditional tape look.
Perhaps the biggest challenge is presenting this new approach to tape to the LTO Consortium, an organization that oversees the development of LTO and includes IBM, HPE and Quantum, all of which may have different commercial strategies that can be costly. drive and cheap tapes. .