While most people think tapes belong to the museum, Sony has forged ahead and developed a new technology that could mean a new breed of magnetic tapes - one that can store up to a whopping 185 TB of information.

Sony developed a magnetic tape material that can store data of up to 148 GB per square inch, which is equivalent to 185 TB of information stored in one cartridge. That is around 74 times the 29.5 GB of information per square inch the standard Linear Type-Open (LTO-6) magnetic tapes can currently hold.

In comparison, one needs 3,700 dual-layer 50 GB Blu-ray discs to contain the same amount of information, or purchase a $9,305 180 TB Backblaze Storage Pod, which is still 5 GB short of storage space against Sony's new tapes.

Most users have chucked magnetic tapes in favor of hard disk drives, portable read-and-write media and the cloud for storage. However, corporations, data centers and other facilities still use LTO-6 magnetic tapes as a backup for safekeeping large amounts of critical information.

In fact, sales of magnetic tapes for storage are on the rise. A press release by LTO quotes [pdf] research firm IDC, which reports that more than 4.4 million LTO drives were shipped since they were introduced in late 2012. The same press release also cites Santa Clara Consulting Group, which says that LTO sold a total of more than 225 million magnetic tape cartridges. This accounts for more than 90,000 PB (petabyte) of information stored in magnetic tapes.

Researchers at Sony used a vacuum thin film-forming technology called sputter deposition to develop the magnetic tapes. This process uses electrostatic discharge to fire argon ions at a polymer substitute, which will then create layers of magnetic crystals.

After fine-tuning sputter conditions and developing a soft magnetic underlayer with a smooth interface on the film, Sony was able to create a layer of closely-packed fine magnetic crystals with an average size of 7.7 nanometers. Standard LTO-6 tapes, on the other hand, have a layer of magnetic powder that is tens of nanometers thick on the surface of the film.

Sony will present the new technology with IBM, which provided assistance in measuring the density of the tapes, at the Intermag Europe 2014 international magnetics conference to be held in Dresden, Germany this May.

The company says it is looking to commercialize its new technology, although it did not specify when consumers can expect a 185 TB tape for sale. Sony also says it will continue to develop sputter technologies to increase recording densities even further.

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