Massive storage capacity in your palms!
E-Mail Print We had only recently, on one of our Future Watch articles, covered a new technology being developed by GE, the U.S. based electronics giant. It talked about holographic storage that will allow users in the near future to straddle a staggering 470GB of data on a singe disc.
Now, we have another team from Swinburne University of Technology in Australia, in collaboration with Samsung who are working on a new technology that can help create discs with a capacity 10,000 times greater than current generation DVDs. The technique allowed them to store an incredible 1.6 terabytes of data on a singe disc - with the potential being believed to be in the vicinity of 10 terabytes! To give you a fair idea on how large this is, a singe terabyte of storage space would be enough to hold 300 feature length films or 250,000 songs.
The technology will use a nanostructured material incorporated onto a disc in such a way that the researchers would be able to increase capacity without increasing the physical size of the disks. This is achieved by "adding" two more spatial dimensions on to the discs in addition t the existing ones. The new dimensions are the spectral and polarization dimensions. These new additions helped researchers to significantly up the storage capacity of the discs.
As for issues, the most daunting one is to find a way to write data on to the discs without having to wait for long periods of time. In any case, it would be a while since these discs would ever make it to the consumer market. We envisage a serious medical and military use of this one as this can be used for storing large amounts of data with encryption - a thing made easier, thanks to the increased data density
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