While you may never see mix tapes or bands releasing their latest albums on cassette any more, the humble Cassette Tape still has a relatively quiet life serving as backup devices for industries with huge amounts of data to keep safe, but no immediate need to get to it later. This is because magnetic tape is still a surprisingly robust way to back up data – and now, Sony have invented a whole new method of storing data to tape which just made it even better.

Due to be discussed at today’s International Magnetics Conference in Dresden, Sony’s new method uses a vacuum-forming technique called sputter deposition to create a layer of magnetic crystals by shooting argon ions at a polymer film substrate. This lets the crystals pack together closer than any previous method to record to tape, reducing wasted space and increasing capacity within a smaller area.

Combine this with the small size of the crystals – just 7.7 nanometres on average – and the results are astonishing: the new tape can hold an eye-popping 148 GB per square inch, or the equivalent of three full-size Blu-Ray disks. Over a 60-minute tape, that equates to 185 TB of data.

But don’t expect to be using this tape to store your huge music collection any time soon – for one thing, you’ll probably find yourself rewinding and fast-forwarding the tape for DAYS. One of the reasons cassette tapes are mostly used for storing data that isn’t intended to be regularly accessed, is because tape is a linear storage method. Files are stored one after the other; so to retrieve a single file, the entire tape has to be ran through until the specific file needed is found. This process is likely to be thousands of times slower with the new tape’s huge level of storage – but that’s hardly a concern for the long-term, industrial-sized data backup performed by the world’s largest data centres, where storing data is paramount but very little is expected to be regularly accessed later. Sony also isn’t saying when or if this new type of tape is expected to hit the market, but assuming it’s only a matter of building the hardware and marketing it, then it’s just a matter of time…