The IBM and Sony, managed to develop a cartridge that fits in the palm of the hand and is capable of storing an incredible 330 TB of data.
This may not seem impressive considering that you can purchase tiny microSD cards that are capable of storing 256 GB of movies, photos and music. But when you fill a cartridge with more than a kilometer of this new tape, you can store 330 TB of data in less space than a hard disk takes up.
As it is a new technology, the existing hardware is not compatible with these tape cartridges, and it is believed that it will take a few more years until the novelty is available in the market.
The novelty would not be exactly interesting to the end consumer, who needs to access the files of their storage devices quickly, but such a cartridge can be worthwhile and very worthwhile for companies that need to store a large amount of data for years and years.
Unlike dishes on computer hard drives, which have ultra-thin layers of various metals to hold tiny magnetic charges, the tape needs to be able to flex, bend and be folded into a reel. As a result, it is usually covered by a thin layer of iron oxide or chromium particles, which are magnetized or demagnetized by a machine and thus create individual bits of data.
Nor does it seem that going back 17 years we were still struggling with the 1,44Mb floppy disks to store documents, today the storage objects are so small and with large capacities.