Sony Crams 3,700 Blu-Rays' Worth of Storage in a Single Cassette Tape
 

http://gizmodo.com/sony-crams-3-700-...gle-1571508568


Stupid hipster 80s fetishism notwithstanding, cassette tapes don't get much love. That's a shame, because magnetic tape is still a surprisingly robust way to back up data. Especially now: Sony just unveiled tape that holds a whopping 148 GB per square inch, meaning a cassette could hold 185 TB of data. Prepare for the mixtape to end all mixtapes.

Sony's technique, which will be discussed at today's International Magnetics Conference in Dresden, 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.

The result: three Blu-Rays' worth of data can fit on one square inch of Sony's new wonder-tape.

Naturally, that kind of memory isn't going to go in the cassette deck on your ancient boom box any time soon. Sony developed the technology for long-term, industrial-sized data backup, a field where tape's slow write times and the time it takes to scroll through yards and yards of tape to find a single file aren't crippling problems.

Sony wouldn't say when or if this new type of tape is expected to hit the market, but when it does, it'll be a victory for the old school. [ExtremeTech]

If you'll notice thats a 60 minute cassette tape. About half of the articles that are written on this topic are using these idiotic images to lure the user into a shock value upon reading this article.

They are talking about DAT tapes. Like 160/320 tapes. They look completely different and have absolutely nothing in common with the regular tape cassette that you would stick in a boombox.

They aren't new...and have been around quite some time.

http://product-images.www8-hp.com/di.../c03128561.png

Finally, an upgrade for my first machine:

http://oldcomputers.net/pics/trs80-i.jpg

I knew cassettes and vinyl will survive :thumbsup