On the one hand, you wonder what good all these yea
dozen GB hard disks are -- who needs 25 gigs of hard
disk storage, anyway? On the other hand, you look at how
much storage space a full-motion video/audio clip takes
up. Hmmm, keeping Die Hard or Breakfast at
Tiffany's on your PC isn't such a good idea, after
all, and don't even mention those hours and hours of
squinchy video your Uncle Ira shot at DisneyWorld. Well,
that may be true now, but not for much longer. Current
technology depends on magnetic storage of data onto a
disk or tape. That technology is about to hit its upper
limitations -- a phenomenon called "superparamagnetism"
makes it impossible to store more than a certain amount
of data on a square inch of magnetic surface (didn't
even want to know that, did you?). The next big thing in
storage technology is "holographic storage." Lucent's
offshoot company Inphase is releasing Tapestry, a data
storage system that holds 100 GB of video (about 20
feature-length films) on a CD-style disk at 20 MB per
second transfer rates. A German team hopes to release a
CD-sized holographic storage unit that can store a
terabyte of information -- think 200 CD-ROMs -- and will
access data at 100 times the speed of a current DVD
drive sometime in 2004. (An IBM research team is gunning
for CD-sized holographic storage media with 125 GB of
space and a 40 MB-per-second transfer rate by 2003.)
Optical disk storage (CDs and DVDs) will stay on the
market for the foreseeable future, but tape's days are
strictly numbered (although it is affordable megastorage
and won't disappear that soon), and magnetic storage is
already last year's buzz. Keep your eyes peeled for the
next big storage phenomenon -- AFM, or "atomic force
microscopy." We're talking storing data down at the
molecular level, keeping perhaps 300-400GB on a disk the
size of a quarter, or a crystal the size of a sugar
cube. Holographic storage has been dubbed the "great
white whale" of modern computing; the ideas are good,
but the implementation continues to elude researchers;
that's changing fast. Find out more at
www.tweak3d.net/articles/howholo/index.shtml.
Imagine having the entire contents of the Library of
Congress on a single disk. It's coming.
On the one hand, you wonder what good all these yea
dozen GB hard disks are -- who needs 25 gigs of hard
disk storage, anyway? On the other hand, you look at how
much storage space a full-motion video/audio clip takes
up. Hmmm, keeping Die Hard or Breakfast at
Tiffany's on your PC isn't such a good idea, after
all, and don't even mention those hours and hours of
squinchy video your Uncle Ira shot at DisneyWorld. Well,
that may be true now, but not for much longer. Current
technology depends on magnetic storage of data onto a
disk or tape. That technology is about to hit its upper
limitations -- a phenomenon called "superparamagnetism"
makes it impossible to store more than a certain amount
of data on a square inch of magnetic surface (didn't
even want to know that, did you?). The next big thing in
storage technology is "holographic storage." Lucent's
offshoot company Inphase is releasing Tapestry, a data
storage system that holds 100 GB of video (about 20
feature-length films) on a CD-style disk at 20 MB per
second transfer rates. A German team hopes to release a
CD-sized holographic storage unit that can store a
terabyte of information -- think 200 CD-ROMs -- and will
access data at 100 times the speed of a current DVD
drive sometime in 2004. (An IBM research team is gunning
for CD-sized holographic storage media with 125 GB of
space and a 40 MB-per-second transfer rate by 2003.)
Optical disk storage (CDs and DVDs) will stay on the
market for the foreseeable future, but tape's days are
strictly numbered (although it is affordable megastorage
and won't disappear that soon), and magnetic storage is
already last year's buzz. Keep your eyes peeled for the
next big storage phenomenon -- AFM, or "atomic force
microscopy." We're talking storing data down at the
molecular level, keeping perhaps 300-400GB on a disk the
size of a quarter, or a crystal the size of a sugar
cube. Holographic storage has been dubbed the "great
white whale" of modern computing; the ideas are good,
but the implementation continues to elude researchers;
that's changing fast. Find out more at
www.tweak3d.net/articles/howholo/index.shtml.
Imagine having the entire contents of the Library of
Congress on a single disk. It's coming.