There’s one thing that the folks who populate Stuff Towers can’t get enough of and that’s digital storage. Sony has just the thing to satisfy our storage-lust and it’s just a pity that their newest upgrade is a high-tech, low-tech solution intended for industrial or business uses. The company has just announced a tape storage development, made with IBM, that is capable of holding 185TB (that’s terabytes) on a single tape.
So you’re not going to be accessing a collection of digital media on the tape any time soon but the advance in tape storage tech has allowed Sony to pack in 149 gigabits into each square inch of storage media. This was achieved by, according to Sony, “…creating a nano-grained magnetic layer with fine magnetic particles and uniform crystalline orientation” that is responsible for the tape’s massive capacity.
It’s quite a technical achievement but nobody out in the consumer world will be picking up a high-end Sony tape drive any time soon. Accessing backups from tape is a slow process at best and it’s nowhere near as efficient as a hard drive, either mechanical or solid-state, when it comes to searching for your files. Still, Sony plans to keep working on their tape storage in order to get the capacity for data even higher. Businesses will be pleased, at the very least, and perhaps they’ll learn something that will make more consumer-friendly storage a more effective medium in future.
