The Cutting Edge: COMPUTING / TECHNOLOGY / INNOVATION : Backup Tapes Keep Growing

It seems as if it took a decade for low-end, quarter-inch cartridge tape backup units to increase from 20-megabyte to 250-megabyte capacities. But future growth ought to be explosive.

Increases have come through higher-density recording on higher-quality, thinner, longer, and now wider, tapes. Even so, tape backup recording densities are low compared with hard-disk recording densities. On the highest-capacity QIC tapes, data is recorded at 200 tracks per inch, whereas hard-disk densities are in the 2,000 to 3,000 track-per-inch range, according to Michael L. Joseph, vice president for strategic marketing at Iomega Corp. That means there is a lot of room for improvement in density.

The top QIC units now use magneto resistive recording head technology, which allows them to store twice as much data on the same size tape.

Another change about to hit the QIC marketplace is TRAVAN technology, which squeezes more tape into the same space by taking advantage of the fact that the amount of tape on one spool decreases as that on the other spool increases.