Magnetic tape provides a cost-effective way to retain the exponentially increasing volumes of data being created in recent years. The low cost per terabyte combined with tape’s low energy consumption make it an appealing option for storing infrequently accessed data and has resulted in a resurgence in use of the technology. Magnetic tape as a digital data storage technology was first commercialized in the early 1950’s and has evolved continuously since then. Despite its long history, tape has significant potential for continued capacity and data rate scaling. This paper strives to provide an overview of linear magnetic tape technology, usage, history, and future outlook. After a short introduction, the paper delves into the details of how modern tape drives and media operate, including the basic mechanism and physics of magnetic recording, current tape media technology, state-of-the art-tape head technology, tape layout and encoding, data retrieval, timing-based servo and mechatronics of a tape drive, and the capabilities of current drives. This is followed by a discussion of tape libraries, an overview of tape library performance modeling research, operating system-level and application-level tape support, tape use cases, and the future scaling potential and outlook of tape. The paper concludes with a history of tape hardware, media, usage and software.

Mark A. Lantz

Simeon Furrer

Martin Petermann

Hugo Rothuizen

Stella Brach

Luzius Kronig

Ilias Iliadis

Beat Weiss

Ed R. Childers

David Pease

ACM Transactions on Storage

ACM TRANSACTIONS ON STORAGE (TOS) 是一本新期刊，旨在发表存储领域和密切相关学科的原始档案论文。出现在 TOS 中的文章将倾向于呈现新技术和概念，或者报告新的经验和实际系统的实验。存储是一个广泛的多学科领域，包括网络协议、资源管理、数据备份、复制、恢复、设备、安全性以及数据编码、密度和低功耗理论。这些领域之间的潜在协同作用有望开辟新的研究方向。

ACM Transactions on Storage (TOS) is an emerging academic journal dedicated to publishing original research papers in the field of storage and closely related disciplines. Articles published in TOS tend to present new technologies and concepts or report on new experiences and experimental results from practical systems. Storage is a broad multidisciplinary field that includes network protocols, resource management, data backup, replication, recovery, device security, as well as data encoding, density, and low-power theories. The potential synergies among these areas are expected to open up new research directions.

《ACM Transactions on Storage》（TOS）是一本新兴的学术期刊，专注于发表存储领域及其相关学科的原创研究论文。TOS刊登的文章通常展示新技术和概念，或报告新的经验和实际系统的实验结果。存储是一个广泛的多学科领域，涵盖网络协议、资源管理、数据备份、复制、恢复、设备安全性，以及数据编码、密度和低功耗理论等方面。这些领域之间的潜在协同作用有望开辟新的研究方向。

Category	Quartile
计算机科学	3
计算机科学, 计算机硬件	3
计算机科学, 计算机软件工程	3

Magnetic Tape Storage Technology

ivySCI AI Smartly Parses PDF, Answers Researchers' Questions, and Helps You Understand Papers in Seconds

Journal Info

Category	Quartile
COMPUTER SCIENCE, SOFTWARE ENGINEERING	2