Sony has created a cassette tape that can store 47 million songs. The company just announced the new technology at the magnetic conference InterMag Europe in Dresden, Germany.
The device will be a far cry from the cassette tapes of old however. Sony's cassette tape will be able to store 180 terabytes of data in just one cartridge, with 148GB of date per inch of tape.
CNN was able to translate that number into around 47 million songs and 3,700 Blu-ray discs. The Apple iPod with the largest storage currently only holds around 40,000 songs, while Sony can accommodate the storage of about 1,184 iPod Classics. It also broke the record previously held by Fuji with a tape that could hold 35TB of data.
Sony detailed its newfangled magnetic-tape technology in a press release, saying that it uses sputter deposition. The process shrinks magnetic particles on a soft magnetic underlayer with a smooth interface to create a nanograined magnetic layer. Each particle is 7.7 nanometers wide, with 10 million nanometers in one centimeter.
The company said that it recognized the need for large data storage as the world is starting to build new data systems. Storing huge amounts of data has become essential, with systems and servers now having to recover more rapidly after natural disasters, and cloud servers expanding and new markets emerging to accommodate large data.
It also plans on further enhancing the technology as well as commercializing it eventually. "Sony will continue to work towards commercializing this next generation tape storage media, as well as the development of increasingly advanced thin layer deposition technologies based on the sputter method, with the aim of increasing recording densities even further."
Sony created the technology by collaborating with IBM, which helped with measuring and assessing the recording density of the new technology.
