Sony to Unveil 185 TB Cassette Type Data Storage

Sony's new magnetic tape technology allows it to store 180 terabytes of data on a single cartridge. That's the same amount of storage as 1,184 iPod Classics, Apple's roomiest music player, which can hold about 40,000 songs. Using that number, Sony's new cassette could technically store about 47.3 million songs of its own. Sony, which worked in collaboration with IBM on the tape, presented the new technology at InterMag Europe, a magnetics conference in Dresden, Germany.

Accordinng to sources the technology involves reducing the microscopic magnetic particles on tape that store data and employs use of sputter deposition. On average, the new particles are 7.7 nanometers wide. It's in big-data applications that such a high-density tape is really needed. Facebook, for example, stores more than 300 petabytes of data from its users (a petabyte is 1,000 terabytes), and that data has to go somewhere. Tapes are used for most high-capacity data archiving.