SONY’s New Cassette Tape With 185TB Storage Can House 60 Million Songs! That’s a World Record.

While we were busy fishing old cassette tapes for trash, Sony has reinvented the device to store a massive amount of data, and massive is sized here at 185TB. That’s pretty huge, what with 60 million songs easily accommodating in it (Movie buffs, replace songs with almost 3,700 Blu-Ray movies. There you go!) But thankfully it’s not that tedious plastic tape that we used to rewind impatiently using our finger. Sony’s world-record setting magnetic tape technology has made it possible to hold 185tb of data on a single cartridge (roughly 148GB data per inch of tape), and this is a figure that heavily buries the standing record of 35Tb set in 2010 by Fuji.

Sony collaborated with IBM on this project, and presented the new technology at a magnetics conference recently held in Dresden, Germany- the InterMag Europe. In technical terms, the company has achieved this milestone thanks to the addition of ‘nano-grained magnetic layer’ to existing forms of storage tape, which faintly boosts the ensity but has larger impact on the storage volume. Simply put, the technology shrinks the microscopic magnetic particle present on the tape which actually store the data. On an average, the new particles are 7.7 nanometers wide. Sony in its press release stated that it’s looking to commercialize this technology, as well as continue bettering it.

An official Sony statement read –

The rapid recovery of data systems such as databases and data servers following natural disasters, as well as secure management of information, has become ever more important, and companies around the world are proceeding to build new data systems In addition, the expansion of cloud services and the creation of new markets to utilise big data have led to a growing need for a data storage media which can store large amounts of information.

This tape has potential for massive data storage, but it’s almost impractical for everyday conventional use. While enterprises shall find this device to be interesting, what with them compiling their data cheaply, favorably and in a more efficient manner, it may not hold a similar appeal to an individual.