American storage giant Western Digital already covers SSDs, memory cards, RAM, and hard drives and has dipped its toes in DNA data storage (it is a founding member of the DNA Data Storage Alliance).
Now, newly unearthed patents seem to show that the company may want to (re)add a bar to complement its existing media collection after the sun went down to its Arkeia line of products a few years ago.
The company has recently obtained a number of patents which stated:embedded tape drive In the last years:
- 11393498 (PDF) (head assembly with suspension for a bar inline engine)
- 20200258544 (PDF) (embedded tape drive)
- 11081132 (PDF) Tape a drive with the hard drive components embedded
- And a little more
What this indicates is an interesting possibility of integrating the basic components of a tape drive with physical tape media in an effort to reduce the environmental and technological complexity inherent in tape libraries as well as improve access time by at least one order of magnitude.
Bringing the read and write heads closer to the media in a closed form factor is nothing new. This is what hard drives do and what others, most notably Iomega with its Zip Drive, have tried to do in the past. The Western Digital patent proposes the adoption of a standardized form factor, 2.5-inch or 3.5-inch, to facilitate adoption by data centers and hyperscales.
cost factor
The included tape will still be more expensive than regular tape (LTO-9 tapes sell for $130 a pop) because of the extra electronics but you don’t need a tape drive to get started. As long as it falls somewhere between tape ($4 per terabyte) and enterprise hard drives ($20 per terabyte), there will be a large market for it.
A standard LTO (Linear Tape Opening) measures 102 x 105 x 21 mm while the average 3.5-inch hard drive measures about 147 x 101 x 26 mm while weighing about a quarter of the weight. LTO-9 has a compressed capacity of 45 terabytes (18 terabytes uncompressed) with the next generation – likely coming in the second half of this decade – doubling the capacity (obviously, there may be some modifications as was the case from gen 8 to tech 9 ).
A sealed LTO-based tape drive is potentially lighter, cheaper, consumes/dissipates less power, but also has more internal computing power than a standard hard disk. Thicker and wider tape spools also allow for much greater capacities (the LTO-9 uses 1 km tape that is 5.2 microns thick and 12.65 mm wide).
Uncompressed capacities of 100TB should be achievable, and Western Digital is uniquely positioned to turn that into practice especially since it can use its expertise in hard drive components.
This new tape could, all things considered, use a similar PCB and interface as an enterprise hard drive; It doesn’t need the traditional tape look. It still has to solve the problem of physically caching the tape to access the required data.
Perhaps the biggest challenge of all is taking this new approach to tape to the LTO consortium, an organization that oversees LTO development and is made up of IBM, HPE, and Quantum, all of whom may have different business strategies that require an expensive drive and cheap tapes.