On December 1, 2000, President Bill Clinton awarded IBM the U.S. National Medal of Technology for 40 years of innovations in hard disk drive technology and information storage products.
IBM received 450 storage patents in 2002, more than twice as many as any other vendor.
IBM's current 100GB Linear Tape Open (LTO) tape puts the equivalent of 2.5 tracks of data onto a strip of tape no wider than a human hair. At a thickness of less than 1/10th of a human hair, the tape moves through the drive at the rate of up to five meters per second.
A terabyte is equal to the number of human heartbeats on the Earth every 2.4 minutes. In seconds, a terabyte is equal to 32,000 years. A terabyte of paper stacked would be 66,000 miles high. If a terabyte of pencils were placed side by side, they would stretch 4.5 million miles. One terabyte is equal to 16 days of continuously running DVD movies or 8,000 times more data than the human brain retains in a lifetime.
In 2002, IBM recorded 1 terabyte of data to a linear digital tape cartridge, storing 10 times more data than any linear tape cartridge then available.
IBM's Shark storage system offers up to 6.9 terabytes of Standby Capacity on Demand. Since the IBM Enterprise Storage System was introduced in 1999, IBM has shipped more than 14,000 of the "Shark" systems. Shark storage systems are installed in 74 percent of the Fortune 100 companies.
Since the late 1950s, disk-drive technologies have yielded a 17-million-fold increase in the amount of information that can be stored on a given area of disk surface.
To store a gigabyte's worth of data just 20 years ago required a refrigerator-sized machine weighing 500 pounds. Today, that same gigabyte's worth of data resides comfortably on a disk smaller than a coin.
While disk storage technology may be more than 40 years old, there has been an eight-thousand-fold speedup in the amount of data a hard drive can read and write in a single second, and a million-fold decrease in the cost of storing each bit of data.
IBM is helping the European Organization for Nuclear Research to create a data file system to handle up to a petabyte (a million gigabytes) of data, which is the equivalent to the information stored in 20 million four-drawer filing cabinets or 500 million floppy disks or 1.5 million CD-ROMs.