It became known that Western Digital received a number of patents that involve the combination of designs and mechanisms of hard drives and tape drives. We are talking about embedded tape drives (LTO), which can accommodate hard drive components. Such drives can take an intermediate place between capacious, but very slow tapes and much faster, but not so capacious hard drives.

The source reports three of the most important patents: 11393498 (head assembly with suspension system for embedded tape drive), 20200258544 (embedded tape drive) and 11081132 (embedded tape drive with hard drive components). Judging by the description, we are talking about transferring read and write nodes borrowed from hard drives to tape cassettes. In fact, WD expects to move away from tape drives and libraries based on them, turning each tape into a drive in the form factor of a hard disk.

Of course, this will make recording on tape more expensive. However, the overall cost of storing data on tapes will be lower than on hard drives in the same form factor. Storage costs will range from $4 per TB on tape to $20 per TB on an enterprise-class hard drive. Tape data access speed will continue to suffer, although the use of flash memory can alleviate this problem. But a unified approach will allow you to install embedded tape drives in existing solutions for scaling disk subsystems and will very easily solve the problem of lack of capacity.

Another question is how the companies that oversee the LTO standard will react to this initiative? The strategy of such companies, chief among which are IBM, HPE and Quantum, involves the availability of expensive drives and whole libraries of libraries and cheap tapes. Western Digital will have to make significant efforts if it wants to bring its development to life. Perhaps it will be helped by the growing demand for tapes, where there is also room for new proposals. And if this does not happen, WD has an “alternate airfield” - storing data on DNA, although that's another story.