When it comes to storage, our focus (obviously) is with self storage units and the safekeeping of physical stuff. That said, even our attention was drawn by the recent announcement from Sony of a breakthrough in data storage.
Proving everything old really does become new again, Sony unveiled at the International Magnetics Conference in Dresden a cassette tape capable of holding 148 gigabytes per square inch. That translates out to 185 terabytes of data per tape. For some perspective, it’s estimated the Library of Congress holds around 10 terabytes of information. So one tape could hold the entire contents of the Library of Congress…eighteen times over.
How Much Information Can One Tape Hold?
For movie fans, one tape could hold 3,700 Blu-Ray discs worth of information. For anyone who finds the storage capacity of their iPod just a bit lacking, one tape could hold approximately 64,750,000 songs.
Don’t go wading through your storage unit looking for your old tape deck just yet though. The super tape is really designing for “long-term, industrial-sized data backup”, the type of data storage where the monotonous process of going through tape to find specific information is less problematic. Using the super tape for music, video or gaming storage and playback isn’t really that feasible.
Music has been going away from the CD to the Mp3 for some time, but for movie and video game enthusiasts it’s still largely about DVDs, Blu-Rays and video game discs. If you ever need to put your collections into storage, be sure to go with a cool, dry place (climate-controlled storage is always an option), which is out of direct sunlight.