Photo courtesy of bgr.com
If you thought that those little tapes that you inserted in your Walkman in the ‘90s are extinct, guess again. Sony just brought them back to life!
Compared to the 2Gb/sq inch of the traditional cassettes, this upgraded version will sport 148 Gb/sq inch. With capacities reaching up to 185 Tb of data, this opens a whole new world for this old music storage. One can store up to 3 million hours of mp3s in one cartridge!
The technology behind this is called sputter disposition. Essentially, a plasma beam creates tiny, detailed magnetic crystals on the surface. With an average of 7.7 nm per crystal, the amount of crystals on the cassette surpasses their old design by far. Sony has also planned to commercialize the technology.
Although these cassettes are less likely to be used for music (imagine fast forwarding 3 million hours of tracks!), they can serve as data backup solutions.
