For general consumers, the era of the cassette tape has long since passed, having been replaced by disc based media and solid state drives for most common uses.

While it tends to be too slow and cumbersome for everyday use (yes, it still has to be physically 'rewound'), tape has remained a popular archiving medium thanks to its reliability and cost-effectiveness. Now Sony has taken that one step further by revealing new tape technology that could well be the next major step in archiving technology.

According to Sony, they have developed "soft magnetic underlayer with a smooth interface using sputter deposition" and "succeeded in creating a nano-grained magnetic layer with fine magnetic particles and uniform crystalline orientation".

In simple terms, this means a whole lot of data can be stored in a very small space. They estimate the tape will be able to store 148 GB per square inch - equivalent to three standard dual-layer BluRay discs - and standard cartridges could hold over 185 TB each. This is around five times the previous tape storage record.

Sony has yet to make the technology commercially available, and it's unlikely we'll see a return to Walkman style music players. However, the development could be hugely beneficial for mass archiving, and proves that the old magnetic tape is far from dead.