Anticipating a storage crunch spurred by big data, IBM and Fujifilm are advancing the state of art in magnetic tape with a prototype capable of storing 85.9 billion bits of data per square inch. In an industry standard LTO size cartridge, tape like that could store up to 154 terabytes of uncompressed data. Today's LTO version 6 cartridge holds 2.5 terabytes. A terabyte is a trillion bytes, or about 1,000GB.