MUMBAI: Things go out of style only to come back as ‘retro’ or ‘vintage’. As vinyls become collectibles, Sony draws our attention back to the cassette tape, which will soon make other storage methods redundant.
Sony recently presented a method of data storage utilising magnetic tape which should be able to store 148 GB per inch or 185 terabytes in total, at the International Magnetics Conference (Intermag) in Dresden, Germany. There, they explained how they enhanced a technology known as ‘sputter deposition’ to achieve the high-storage cassette tapes, which are about 74 times the capacity of tapes being used today.
That capacity would mean that Sony’s new tapes can hold the equivalent of 3,700 Blu-ray discs. Such technology would be valuable to tech giants like Google and Facebook that use data centres to store all the information users upload to their services. Cassette tapes like these would help them store more data in the same amount of space that they presently use.
According to reports, the amount of data on the planet will reach 40 zettabytes by 2020, which is about 5,200 gigabytes for every person in the world. Sony wants to commercialise their product and bring it to market in the near future.
In a statement to the press, Sony said, “The expansion of cloud services and the creation of new markets to utilise big data have led to a growing need for a data storage media which can store large amounts of information.”
The cassette tapes, which were developed with the help of IBM, obliterate the previous record set in 2010 by Fujifilm and IBM that developed a tape capable of holding 35 terabytes.