Sony’s New Tape Cassette Could Hold Up to 185TB per Cartridge

Sony has just developed a new magnetic tape capable of storing 148Gb per square inch which it revealed this week during Intermag Europe 2014. In comparison to the classic cassette’s 2Gb/sq, inch, these new cartridges would be theoretically capable of storing up to 185TB of data, the approximate equivalent of about 3M hours or 359 years of 320 MP3s. The United States of America (aka. ‘Murica) has existed for 238 years. Let that sink in for a moment.

The high storage capacity is attributed to the new recording material they developed using sputter deposition which is some pretty bad-ass chemistry (and is also used to create the magnetic film used on CDs). Essentially a beam of plasma is fired into a magnetic field which directs the ions at a target polymer substrate (a long, repeating molecule) which, upon impact, form fine magnetic crystals on the surface. In this case, Sony and IBM were able to confirm an average crystal size of 7.7nm which is the length of approximately 77 atoms and some of the smallest such crystals ever synthesized reliably. Sony has even announced it has plans to commercialize the technology, though there’s currently no release date.

Now, unfortunately, these new tapes don’t really pose a practical solution for storing and playing back media but they would be useful for large data backups and more importantly, the technology is the step forward towards the next generation of data storage mediums and even solar technology. Yeah, science *****.

I think I’ll have to bust out some of my old tapes. If you have a nice player and can get a good signal/noise ratio, you almost wonder why we ever switched to CD (RIP Analog… and on my shelves).

STAY IN THE KNOW! SIGN UP FOR THE RUN THE TRAP NEWSLETTER 

Sony’s New Tape Cassette Could Hold Up to 185TB per Cartridge