This initial blog (as prior years’ projections blogs) will discuss advances in magnetic recording, which have enabled magnetic hard disk drives and magnetic tape recording. The Figure below shows maximum announced product areal density for HDDs, showing little improvement in the maximum areal density since 2015. Magnetic tape LTO is the magnetic tape leader at about 80% of the market and IBM enterprise tape is most of the balance. As a consequence, magnetic tape has a lot of magnetic technology available that could be applied to increase tape storage capacity. IBM is the sole manufacturer of magnetic tape drives and Fujifilm along with Sony, are the only remaining manufacturers of magnetic tape.

Source: Forbes December 19, 2020 00:56 UTC