Well, first it was Vinyl records making a comeback, now the cassette. Really? YEP! Don't toss those old cassettes, just yet. Imagine cramming 3700 Blu-Ray's worth of storage on one cassette tape.

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Sony is pushing to make it happen. At a technology conference is Europe, Sony is debuting a method of data storage that uses magnetic tape which is capable of holding a ton of data -- 148GB per inch of tape.

If you are like me, you have many fond memories of walking into American, Circuit City, stocking up on those Sony, Maxell, TDK and Certron (The cheap one) blank cassette tapes in the 70's and 80's, and recording your favorite songs off the radio, or putting you records on tape so you could listen to them in your car or on your boombox. Sony’s new breakthrough in storage capacity would mean one immensely large mixtape.

Unfortunately, These new tapes will not play in your Walkman, though. Sony’s new technology means you could fit an amazing 185TB onto a single cassette tape. Keep in mind, the average Blu-Ray movie disc holds about 50GB of data. Your standard and a standard personal computer hard drive can hold about 1TB of data.

Sony's new technology utilizes a technology called “sputter deposition.” This technology involves layers of magnetic crystals firing argon ions at a polymer film substrate. I have no Idea what that is, but it works according to Sony.Sony maintains that magnetic tape is still useful for mass data storage and backup, and Sony wants to commercialize their product and bring it to market in the near future.

Interestingly, the Tape Storage Council claimed that tape storage shipments grew 13% in 2012, and were projected to grow to 26% in 2013.

The questions being asked is that in this age of cloud storage and reduced hard drive prices, why would cassette tape still be relevant? A 2012 report at NewScientist explains that traditional hard drive data centers use 200 times more energy than a tape storage array of the same size.

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