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

[dlevere]

The worst storage mediums of all time

[Pyriel]

Yes, when they finally perfect holographic storage and quantum processors, and can build them on a scale and at a cost that makes them accessible to the typical consumer, it'll be a new renaissance of computing. Those inventions are on the list of things that are always "X" years away, though. It's hardly worth getting excited about, unless you're in the lab working on them.

[xirtamehtsitahw]

We could engineer a quantum leap in hard-drive sizes if we could abandon the odd obligation to build drives using two-dimensional storage formats. Thus, we'd have to ditch the disk and can the cassette. We'd have to use a whole new storage medium that would still involve lasers, but what if we were to create something that involves wireless access to a three-dimensional storage device?

Computers could be built thousands, if not millions of times faster than they are today, due to the fact that they would produce little heat. The heat in a computer tower arises mainly from the spinning of the hard drive disks. They spin constantly, even when the computer is idle, because they have to remain in a state of cosntant readiness.

Were heat to be removed from the equation (or nearly so), more time and effort could be placed on building computers to take advantage of this massive heat reduction and focus mainly on speed and ease of access rather than waste valuable tower space by inserting heatsinks or fans.

[Pyriel]

Pie in the sky dreams there. You have to assume that this will translate into something useable for either solid state or spinning platters, and then scale it up a further 6 times. Tape has been way out ahead of hard drives of any sort for decades now, in terms of capacity, and hard drives have never made leaps by adapting techniques from sequential media as far as I know.

[xirtamehtsitahw]

Actually, if Sony can do that to a cassette tape, imagine what they could do to the future generation of disc-based storage media.

*drooling at the prospect of having nearly a PETAbyte of space on a single hard drive...on a TABLET...*

[47iscool]

I don't know if 'amazing' is the right word or not.

[dlevere]

By Robert Sorokanich


Image: Shutterstock/Giuliano Coman

Stupid hipster 80's 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]