While updating one of my technology websites, it occurred to me that some folks might be interested in last Friday’s column.
As I’m not pimping my sites–it’s a targeted audience anyway–I won’t post or distribute links to them. I just thought some of you might find the information to be interesting.
**Friday, 17 March, 2000**
Digital Optical Storage that yields 1TB of storage space on a standard CD media footprint!
The first practical retail-side mass storage devices hit the market back in the '80s, weighing in at a paltry 5MB and tipping the price scales at over $3000.00. They were noisy, slow and notoriously unreliable--simply bumping the cabinet housing a spinning hard drive could cause irrepairable data loss--and many of you will no doubt remember the headaches of getting the CMS hard drives, supplied with the IBM AT, to do something exotic--like boot. "AUTOEXEC.BAT is a sturdy wood or aluminum shaft, used to coax AT hard drives into working properly;" was a common joke heard in the industry.
Alas, those fun-filled days are no more. Advances in storage media composition and the advent of thin-film magneto-resistive heads have given us quality drives possessed of capacities of 40GB and greater; at prices in the sub $300.00 range and having areal densities in excess of 6,408Mb per square inch / 19,300 TPI. With MTBF figures, for a good quality hard drive, regularly quoted at 800,000 hours, one wonders where the practical limits of magnetic storage lay, and if we are not rapidly approaching those limits.
Researchers at the Bayer Institute in Leverkusen, Germany announced in January that Photo-Addressable Polymers (PAP) will make these limits trivial within the next few years, with access speeds projected at 1Gb per second.
The foundational technology is a solid performer at present, with the only problem being the lack of polymers of sufficient thickness to allow for useful three-dimensional storage. They have narrowed their scope of investigation from 300 possible polymer candidates to 5 prospective molecular structures. It is hoped that the most desirable characteristics from each of these compounds can be combined to yield the desired results.
All present forms of magnetic and optical storage technology are essentially two-dimensional in nature, with the only exception being Dual-Layer DVD, and it is a bare exception at best.
CD optical media must be read at a fixed angle, while PAP media is designed to be read from multiple angles and is based upon holographic techniques. Therein lies the storage density advantage.
With traditional two-dimensional storage technologies reaching their projected density limits within the next few years, this branch of research is being vigorously pursued globally.
To give you an idea of the storage capacity of 1TB--which is equal to 1099511627776 bytes--this is equal to the combined storage capacity of 1613.193854 standard 74 minute CDs.
If you desire further information on the topic of holography, please see: [http://web2.thesphere.com/SAS/](http://web2.thesphere.com/SAS/)
Look for more news of this evolving technology in future columns.
–Kalél
TheHungerSite.com
“If ignorance is bliss, you must be orgasmic.”
“Well, there was that thing with the Cheese-Wiz…but I’m feeling much better now!” – John Astin, Night Court