Recently, with the rise of big data and artificial intelligence technologies, enterprises are generating massive amounts of data, covering various aspects of their businesses.

Financial regulatory authorities have required institutions to retain data for longer periods. As a result, the volume of data stored by both enterprises and institutions is increasing.

Research reports confirm that the amount of data stored annually is growing at a rate of 30-40%. Meanwhile, hardware capacity is also increasing, but at half the rate. Fortunately, much of this information does not require immediate access, making tape storage a perfect choice.

Kidding, right? Tape? When you hear 'tape,' you might think of old movies like 'Tron' or 'Dr. Strangelove,' with bulky mainframes and spinning tape reels. But this is no joke; tape storage is still widely used.

A significant amount of data is stored on tape, including fundamental scientific data such as particle physics, radio astronomy, human cultural heritage, national archives, important films, banking, insurance, oil exploration, and more. Some are actively seeking ways to increase tape storage capacity.

Tape technology has been around for a long time, and it hasn't stopped advancing, much like hard drives and transistors. Over the past few decades, tape technology has progressed rapidly.

The first commercial digital tape storage device, the Model 726, could store 1.1MB of data on a tape reel. Today, a modern tape reel can store 15TB of data, and a tape library can hold up to 278PB of data (1PB = 1024TB).

If you were to store this much data on CD-ROMs, you would need 397 million of them stacked to a height exceeding 476 kilometers. How's that for scale? 278PB is equivalent to 291,504,128GB. An ordinary CD-ROM holds about 700MB, so that's roughly 397 million discs.

You might think that once humans can't squeeze more data onto disks, the same would apply to tape because it uses essentially the same technology, just older. However, reality surprises us; tape capacity has continuously increased, with no signs of stopping. Tape capacity has been growing at 33% annually, and this pace could continue. In other words, tape capacity doubles every 2-3 years. You can think of it as the "Moore's Law" of tape.

With data exploding and storage budgets remaining constant, the continuous increase in tape capacity is good news.

In information technology, perhaps only tape technology will continue to follow a development trajectory similar to Moore's Law in the next 10 years. Tape has cost advantages over hard drives and other storage technologies, and this advantage will likely expand further in the future. You may rarely see the tape, only in old movies, but tape technology is not obsolete and won't be for many years to come.