Storage

Have you read the Economist this week? No? There's an article entitled 'Taking storage to the next dimension'.

Are you old enough to remember using those 5.25 inch floppy disks, let alone 3.4" floppies? No? Well, CDs were huge when they came in weren't they? NO, then you remember DVDs really.

Well, BluRay has come along with its 25Gb storage capacity. Then the other day I mentioned the terabyte drive I saw in a shop the other day.

Well, that article tells us that some Fortune 1000 companies are storing as much as 680 terabytes of data and information EVERY YEAR. So that's a lot then ... just work out what it means if you can!

Now there is going to be holographic storage: 300 gigabytes on a disk which is 12 times what we can get on a BluRay disk and 60 times more than a DVD. Not big enough for you? Well, the article says that within a few years, those 300 Gb will become 1,600Gb or 1.6Tb.

Holographic disks don't spin, either, their rotate ever so slowly ... read the article to see why! They're not slow to write either, as they will transfer data at the rate of one million bits at a time. That translates to 160 megabits a second.

These are corporate dreams at the moment and since large corporations pay a lot to store their data on magnetic tapes that take up lots of room and so on, please bear in mind that a holographic drive will cost $18,000 and each 300Gb disk will cost $180.

Thought you'd like to know that!

DW