Cassette Tapes to make a return? If it happens it won't be in the way you think.

[BeerAndPoker]

http://gizmodo.com/sony-crams-3-700-...ium=socialflow

Sony Crams 3,700 Blu-Rays' Worth of Storage in a Single Cassette Tape
Robert Sorokanich
Today 10:16am

Stupid hipster 80s fetishism notwithstanding, cassette tapes don't get much love. That's a shame, because magnetic tape is still a surprisingly robust way to back up data. Especially now: Sony just unveiled tape that holds a whopping 148 GB per square inch, meaning a cassette could hold 185 TB of data. Prepare for the mixtape to end all mixtapes.

Sony's technique, which will be discussed at today's International Magnetics Conference in Dresden, 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.

The result: three Blu-Rays' worth of data can fit on one square inch of Sony's new wonder-tape.

Naturally, that kind of memory isn't going to go in the cassette deck on your ancient boom box any time soon. Sony developed the technology for long-term, industrial-sized data backup, a field where tape's slow write times and the time it takes to scroll through yards and yards of tape to find a single file aren't crippling problems.

Sony wouldn't say when or if this new type of tape is expected to hit the market, but when it does, it'll be a victory for the old school.

That is some amazing amount of storage one tape can hold but even with a new, improved design I'm not sure I'd trust this form of backup if it ever hits the market just from bad memories when I was a kid of them getting caught in a player and falling apart.

[Bootsy Collins]

Corporate data is still being backed up to tape. I don't see that trend ending anytime soon.

[BeerAndPoker]

Corporate data is still being backed up to tape. I don't see that trend ending anytime soon.

Not really referring to that but yes tape backup is the old school way that continues to this day. It's still slow as hell but reliable.

[4Dragons]

Can't count how many tapes I lost to getting eaten by the machine. Old cassette tapes were unreliable. New tapes for digital backup have much better longevity and transport mechanisms. Those old tapes stretched over time as well. Dunno what that means digitally but it can't possibly be good.

[son of lockman]

Tapes? I remember the 4 tracks.

[PLOL]

What's a cassette tape?

[DirtyB]

Corporate data is still being backed up to tape. I don't see that trend ending anytime soon.

I'm sure plenty of big operations still use tapes. But over the last 5 years, we've moved all of our customers from tapes to remote online storage. It's not technically cloud storage, but it's cloud-esque.