Sony Unveils Cassette Tape That Holds 64,750,000 Songs!

You probably threw out your old cassette tapes years ago. Well, Sony has just announced a game changer. A single cassette tape that can hold almost 65 MILLION songs!

There are people in your life that have never even seen a real cassette tape. With the release of CD's, and the development of the MP3, why would they need to see one of those clunkers?

Out of the blue, Sony whips out a cassette tape that can hold 64,750,000 songs. Excuse me while I throw away my iPod...

These cassette tapes can hold 148 gigs of data PER SQUARE INCH. If you're as bad at math as I am, that is 185 terabytes of data.

The tape was unveiled at the International Magnetics Conference over the weekend.

How in the hell do they fit so much data onto a single cassette tape? According to Gizmodo:

“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.”

 

Just to put it into perspective even further, you can fit 3 Blu-ray discs worth of data...per square inch. That's a total of 3,700 Blu-ray's on a single cassette tape.

The Library of Congress has about 10 TB worth of data. So one single tape can hold 18.5 versions of the frickin Library of Congress!

There's something to think about here, though. How would you search for stuff on these things? Is it gonna be like in the old days, and you just have to fast forward and rewind? No skipping songs, and such?

Gizmodo also points out that although the cassette's will be available for commercial sale, they were made for “long-term, industrial-sized data backup”, and not necessarily for music, games, and video playback.