While there’s been niche attempts to give it a resurrected revival the same way vinyl has (*cough* International Cassette Store Day), the audio cassette tape isn’t exactly a lasting format. In fact, it’s fallen so far out of the popular consciousness that most kids these days don’t even know what it is or does.
But in a bitter twist of irony, the cassette tape is returning in a new guise, from the very makers who agreed that the format was done and dusted when they axed their popular Walkman portable players.
Sony has revealed a new tape that holds more storage capacity in one square inch than several standard iPods combined, 148 gigabytes per square inch to be precise and up to 185 terabytes per tape.
The revived cassette was shown off at Dresden’s International Magnetics Conference this past weekend, as Extreme Tech (via Consequence Of Sound) reports, and uses the same magnetic tape that audio cassettes and VHS tapes have been using for the last 50 years – Sony just found a new way to store more onto it.
If you’ve not picked up your jaw from the floor over the 185 TB capacity, Extreme Tech offers some handy comparisons to give you an idea at just how much the new cassette can hold. It’s about three times the data of an average BluRay disc per square inch, or around 3,700 BluRays equivalent for a single cassette. One of these new tapes could hold 64,750,000 songs… That’s a hell of an epic mixtape for your loved one.
Better yet, going by the average song length of three minutes, one of these new tapes could hold 64,750,000 songs (around 8,093,750 days of listening). That’s a hell of an epic mixtape for your loved one.
So how did Sony manage to boost the capacity of technology that’s half-a-century old without the aid of black magic? Through a rather silly sci-fi sounding process called ‘sputter deposition’, which (ready tech-heads?) “creates layers of magnetic crystals by firing argon ions at a polymer film substrate. Combined with a soft magnetic under-layer, the magnetic particles measured in at just 7.7 nanometers on average, able to be closely packed together.”
In layman’s terms this means that more data can be compacted into the fine layers of magnetic strips than any standard cassette could in history (the largest capacity previously was four years ago; a meagre 29.5GB per square inch).
Sony intends the new cassette to be available for commercial use, with no confirmed release date set yet, but here’s the rub: the ultra-capacity tape is designed for industrial sized data back-up rather than everyday use for storing music and video, cheifly due to the slow read and write times. But still, it offers some pretty amazing prospects for the future of storing massive amounts of data.
The best example comes from Extreme Tech, who point out that the Library of Congress’ entire contents – sounds, archives, the lot – takes up about 10 TB of data. One of these new cassettes can easily hold that amount of information more than 18 times over.
