Shelves housing historic photographs in the Hulton Archives.

Recent announcements in magnetic tape and optical disc technology promise hefty storage media for future data archive applications. The LTO program announced its generation 14 with 576TB of native storage and an optical disc startup, Folio Photonics announced a new optical archive media that could enable 100TB optical disc cartridges by 2030.

The LTO Program Technology Provider Companies (TPCs), Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company, International Business Machines Corporation, and Quantum Corporation, released an updated LTO tape roadmap. The new roadmap extends out to 14 generations, with the new gen 14 magnetic tape targeted as supplying up to 576TB of native capacity with up to 1.44PB of (2.5:1) compressed data per tape cartridge. LTO generation 9 tapes are currently available with native capacity up to 18TB per cartridge.

Magnetic tape is the most cost-effective storage media with tape media costs at less than a penny a GB (<$0.01/GB). Magnetic tape is widely used for data archiving and is also promoted as enabling an air-gap for off-line data on magnetic tape, which can be important in recovering from various malware. The LTO roadmap is shown in the figure below.

Updated LTO Magnetic Tape Roadmap with Generation 14

Earlier in 2022 the LTO Program announced that LTO tape capacity shipments in 2021 were 148EB. In 2019 LTO capacity shipments were 114EB but fell to 105EB in 2020, during the pandemic. Overall LTO capacity growth was about 41% from 2020 to 2021.

At the end of August 2022, a startup, Folio Photonics, announced a new approach to optical storage that could extend the archive storage capacity for optical discs beyond what is available today. Sony and Panasonic announced a roadmap for Blu-ray write-once optical discs in 2014, but commercially available discs haven’t exceeded 300GB per disc, although 500GB discs have been on display at shows. The higher capacity optical discs used recording on multiple layers to achieve their capacity, but commercial products with more than four layers suffer from signal loss due to optical absorption.

Folio Photonics is making an advanced optical recording material using a polymer co-extrusion process with new materials and with a customized optical pickup unit (see image below).

Image of Folio Photonics Optical Archive Disc

Folio said that they had demonstrated 8-layer per disc side (3-layers per side is the maximum available today for write once archive disks) but that 16 layers were possible with 32+ layers achievable by 2030. The disks accomplish higher levels of multi-layer recording with crosstalk cancellation, inter-symbol interference cancellation and using multicolor multiplexing as well as polarization multiplexing. They think they can do at least the first few generations of this product using conventional Blu-ray optical wavelengths.

The company says that their low-cost production process enables making discs with low costs and that increases in capacity can be achieved without increases in production costs for future generation products. The company is promoting their product as providing an airgap (like magnetic tape) that can reduce the impact of cybercrime and like magnetic tape, an optical disc library consumes little energy until the data is accessed.

The company is targeting initial disc availability in 2024 with a capacity of 1TB per disc (10TB per 10-disc cartridge). The company’s roadmap, shown below, project much higher capacities with additional layers and increases in capacity per layer. The figure below shows Folio Photonics optical disc roadmap, with up to 10TB per disc possible by 2030 (100TB in a 10 disc cartridge).

Folio Photonics Archive Optical Disc Roadmap

The LTO magnetic tape program companies announced their generation 14 product with native storage capacities of 576TB (1.44PB with 2.5:1 compression). Folio Photonics announced a new optical recording media that could enable 100TB optical disc cartridges by 2030.