Break out your #2 pencils and get ready to wind that tape because believe it or not the cassette tape is making a comeback. Don't run out and get a tape deck put in your car just yet because this isn't your basic cassette tape from the '90s. Sony has developed a new tape that can hold up to 180 terabytes of data. That's the same amount of storage as 1,184 iPod Classics, Apple's roomiest music player, which can hold about 40,000 songs. Using that number, Sony's new cassette could technically store about 47.3 million songs of its own. If you want to store movies instead of music the new tape can hold around 3,700 Blu-ray discs. Sony teamed with IBM to develop this new age tape and presented it's new device to a magnetics conference in Germany this past weekend. Sony explained that the whole thing comes down to magnetic particles, here comes the science,
In very simple terms, the technology involves shrinking the microscopic magnetic particles on tape that store data. On average, the new particles are 7.7 nanometers wide. There are 10 million nanometers in one centimeter.
The new cassette could revolutionize the way we store data. The only downside at this point is that you can't pop it into any old tape deck and enjoy your music. Sony says the cassette is just a storage device and can not be used as a normal cassette would be. The tape itself and it's storage are the main attraction, they just thought it would be cool to make it look like an old cassette tape,
Tape has the potential for massive data storage, but it's unwieldy to actually use. Recording to, and retrieving data from, tape takes a lot longer than digital storage devices and players we've become accustomed to in an era of Web streaming.
CNN has the story
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