Sony has developed a cassette tape that can store up to 185 terabytes of data – 74 times the capacity of traditional tapes or the equivalent of 3,700 Blu-ray discs or 47 million songs or all the music on the iTunes Store nearly ten times over.
Sony detailed its magnetic-tape technology in a recent press release, saying that it uses sputter deposition. The process shrinks magnetic particles on a soft magnetic underlay with a smooth interface to create a nanograined magnetic layer. Each particle is 7.7 nanometers wide, with 10 million nanometers in one centimeter.
The new storage media is not yet commercially available, but Sony continues to work on it and other technologies using the sputter method.