Sony has capitalized on the recent boost in popularity of cassette tapes (dammit, hipsters, why won’t you let any old technology die?!) by introducing a tape that holds a mind-blowing amount of storage – 185TB, to be exact.
As broken down by ExtremeTech, a dual layer Blu-ray can store 50GB of its disk, meaning that these tapes have 3,700 times the amount of storage that a Blu-ray can hold.
Sony has achieved this by developing a new magnetic tape material that can store 148GB per square inch, with a cartridge of this tape holding an amazing 185TB. That’s 189,440GB, which is more storage than the average user would need in their lifetime.
Of course, tape storage is difficult to implement for the common user who simply wants to hold more movies, music and video games, so this tech is squarely focused on appealing to large corporations that still employ the usage of tapes to store massive amounts of data. However, Sony has stated that it is aiming to make the tech a consumer product, so maybe you’ll be hooking up a tape to your desktop sooner than you think – if you can afford its inevitably hefty price tag, that is.
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