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While hard drive deliveries in Q4 2022 have practically halved, there is another storage medium that is enjoying good performance, and we are not talking about SSDs but magnetic tapes. The trend does not involve the consumer market, but the sectors of the so-called “cold storage“, and could last until 2027.
There are several reasons, but the main one is of course the cost: magnetic tape has a significantly higher price/capacity ratio than conventional hard drives. For comparison, a reel of magnetic tape can hold up to 580TB of data, about 30 times more than the largest HDDs.
Of course, unlike hard drives, magnetic tape can only be read or written to sequentially, which is why performance is noticeably lower compared to traditional HDDs. However, this is an acceptable trade-off especially in the context of cold storage.
For the uninitiated, in fact, by “cold storage” we mean long-term archiving data, i.e. information that is almost never accessed, but which needs to be maintained. Under these conditions, therefore, archiving on tape represents the most flexible solution, especially in view of the fact that the data to be archived increases every year.
Not surprisingly, the reels have sold for a total of 79.3 exabytes scoring a +14% in 2022 every year. A trend that according to analysts will continue until at least 2027 with a compound annual growth rate of 21%, bringing total shipments to 207.1 EB in that year.
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