If you thought the days of making mix tapes for your new lover was a thing of the past, you can breathe out a big sigh of relief – the long gone romance is about to make a come back, all thanks to Sony.
Your average cassette tape of the past could manage “about 29.5 GB per square inch” and the new one… wait for it… 148 GB per square inch. Consequence of Sound (CoS) very nicely did the math for me (I am terrible with numbers) and can tell you that a cassette will soon be able to hold 185 terabytes.
I’m pretty sure my external movie hard drive is only one terabyte… sigh.
The tape 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.
Between CoS and Extreme Tech, they are doing some great things to make the cassette more understandable:
- It’s three Blu-rays’ worth of data per square inch. Or, a total of 3,700 Blu-rays on a single tape. That’s a stack of boxes that would be nearly 15 feet high.
- A single tape holds five more TB than this hard drive storage array, which has to be custom-made and runs for $9,305.
- A total of 64,750,000 songs. If the average song is, say, three minutes, that’s enough music to last you 134,896 days.
- The entirety of the Library of Congress represents about 10 total TB. One tape can hold 18.5 versions of the Library of Congress.
