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Sony announced it had crammed 185TB of data

Sony has brought the cassette back from the dead by unveiling a tape that can hold a whopping 148 gigabytes per square inch. If you can’t do the math, that’s 185 terabytes of total data.

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So, just how much data can a tape with 185 TB capacity actually hold? Here’s a few handy comparisons (via ExtremeTech):

– It’s three Blu-rays’ worth of data per square inch. Or, a total of 3,700 Blu-rays on a single tape. That’s a stack of boxes that would be nearly 15 feet high.

– A single tape holds five more TB than this hard drive storage array, which has to be custom-made and runs for $9,305.

– A total of 64,750,000 songs. If the average song is, say, three minutes, that’s enough music to last you 134,896 days.

– The entirety of the Library of Congress represents about 10 total TB. One tape can hold 18.5 versions of the Library of Congress.

The tape will be available for commercial sale, but no word yet on a release date. However, as Gizmodo points out, the super tape was originally developed for “long-term, industrial-sized data backup” and not necessarily for music, game, and video storage and playback.

http://consequenceofsound.net/2014/05/r-i-p-ipod-sony-unveils-cassette-tape-that-can-hold-64750000-songs/