Anyone who might have spotted a large order of champagne delivered to the Armonk area last night will now know why: IBM has just set a new record for the amount of big data stored on tape.

The Big Blue scientists have announced an eye-watering 85.9 billion bits of data per square inch on the latest tape, built from barium ferrite in conjunction with Fujitsu. This translates to 154 terabytes of uncompressed data on a standard LTO size cartridge – or, in non-tech terms, around 154 million books in one cartridge.

The tape weighs in at 4.3 micrometres thick and 1255 metres long – an improvement on the equivalent in 2010, which was a mere 5.9 micrometres and 917m.

“Even though tape technology is more than 60 years old, it’s very relevant today for one main reason: big data,” said Dr. Mark Lantz at IBM Research. “There’s …