Hard drives reaching 1 terabyte of storage is new, but not new enough to get excited about. However, since many enterprises still rely upon and trust tape as their primary data archiving medium, HDD reaching 1TB is relatively meaningless for them. However, now that Sun has unveiled 1TB capacity tapes, business with mass amounts of data to store have something to smile about. The Storage Tek T100000B tape drive is the first of such devices to reach 1TB and even higher capacities, thanks to a new formatting technique that lets it achieve more density than previous models.

Supposedly they have an updated format in the works as well, LTO-5, which will be able to format tapes as large as 1.6TB in size. Not all that exciting for a desktop – but for a company that needs to put hundreds of terabytes of data into cold storage for long periods of time, 1.6TB of tape in one package is definitely handy.