CD’s and iPods made you stuff your old Michael Jackson, Enigma and Celine Dion cassettes in your attic. But remember a time when the cassette tapes dominated the sales market? In 1990 alone, a overwhelming 442 million tapes were sold. However, with the rise of the CD, the birth of the MP3, and the ultimate restoration of vinyl, sales of cassettes dwindled. By 2007 only a mere 274,000 individual cassettes were sold.
Now, though, Sony has brought the cassette back from the dead by unveiling a tape that can hold a massive 148 gigabytes per square inch. If you can’t do the math, that’s 185 terabytes of total data. Well I guess, we will soon be tossing our iPods into the trashcans.
185 Tb actually is huge data size; if calculated the super tape can hold 3,700 Blue-ray’s or a total of 64,750,000 average 3 min. songs
The tapes were unveiled in International magnetic conference. These Sony cassettes can hold data 74 times more than the standard cassettes. According to Gizmodo:
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“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.”
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The tape will be accessible for commercial sale, but no word yet on a release date. However, as Gizmodo points out, the super tape was formerly developed for “long-term, industrial-sized data backup” and not essentially for music, game, and video storage and playback.
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