Sony’s new magnetic tape can hold 74 times more data

Sony has developed a magnetic tape for data storage, which can store 148Gb per square inch. As a result, a data cartridge could contain a total of 185TB of data. Sony achieved that by reducing magnetic particles.

Sony has developed a smooth magnetic substrate consisting of magnetic particles with an average size of 7.7nm, much smaller than the tens of nanometers of traditional tape storage. This has been achieved by keeping the magnetic underlayer smooth, so that the crystals of the underlayer lie in the same direction.

The latter has not been possible until now, because the magnetic underlayer was not smooth enough. As a result, many more particles fit on a smaller surface and a data cartridge with this technology can therefore store much more data. Drives with this technology can hold 148 gigabits per square inch, far more than the roughly 2 gigabits per square inch of traditional magnetic tape storage.

The manufacturer says it is looking for ways to use this technology commercially and that will probably be for data centers, which service providers use for backups; this form of storage is too slow for cloud data storage. The chance that Sony will use this technology for consumer products also seems small.