Jackson Barnett
Staff Writer
Cassette tapes were discarded years ago for being enormously inferior to compact discs. Now CDs are on the path to irrelevance with digital music programs like iTunes and Spotify. One would think that cassette tapes would never be important again… but Sony is proving us wrong with a recent announcement regarding the storage capacity of the cassette tape.
Recently, Sony released a type of tape for cassettes that holds 148 GB of data per square inch… which translates to 185 TB of data per cassette. This roughly equates to 555 BluRays per cassette, 37,888,000 songs per cassette, and 185 times the amount of free storage Flickr allows users when they sign up for an account. Basically, the cassette wins.
As awesome as this new technology is, it will be a while–if ever–before it’s released to the public. This 21st century cassette tape is marketed for backing up the data and information of high-end corporations. However, I believe that hipsters everywhere will rejoice in the future when they find that cassette tapes are being sold next to external hard drives.
What do you think? Do you want one of your own? Let us know in the comments below!