Sony And IBM Time Travel To Bring The Cassette Tape Into The Future

Children of the 80s and 90s would likely get nostalgic over the thought of a cassette tape. They might have fond memories of carrying around their Walkman in their Jansport backpack or having to manually rewind a tape with a #2 pencil. Regardless, the cassette tape was already becoming obsolete by 1993 and, today, few kids have ever seen a cassette tape up close.

Over this past weekend, Sony (which worked with IBM) presented new cassette-related technology at the International Magnetics Conference in Dresden, Germany. Apparently, the companies have been working on changing the obsolete technology into something spectacularly useful for the future.

The magnetic tape technology that was presented stores up to 185 terabytes of data on a single tape. What does that mean in terms of media storage? It means that the cassette can hold up to 47.3 million songs or 3,700 Blu-ray discs worth of movies.

The previous record for cassette data storage was set in 2010 by Fuji. Fuji had developed a tape that could hold 35 terabytes of data. Sony blew the competition out of the water with this one.

How were they able to create such mind-blowing storage capabilities? According to Gizmodo:

“The tape uses a vacuum-forming technique called sputter deposition to create a layer of magnetic crystals by shooting argon ions at a polymer film substrate. The crystals, measuring just 7.7 nanometers on average, pack together more densely than any other previous method.”

To put that into perspective, you should know that there are 10 million nanometers in a single centimeter.

Although Sony intends to continue working toward commercializing the cassette storage media, don’t start worrying about converting your media into another format. The tape is a little unwieldy and recording to or retrieving data from it takes a lot more time and effort than the devices we work with now.

Could you imagine trying to rewind or fast-forward to your favorite song when it only takes up a microscopic amount of room on that tape?

The new cassette does have some extremely beneficial uses, though. Likely, the technology will be used to back up huge databases. Companies such as Facebook could use the tape to back up user information.

Sony addressed the importance of having a storage system, like the one they announced, in a press release:

“In recent years, 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 utilize big data have led to a growing need for a data storage media which can store large amounts of information.”