Storage Technology Corp (StorageTek) has revealed more details of its holographic storage technology (CI No 3,555). The company is developing a laser optic holographic storage system that stores data on crystals. A crystal can store up to a terabyte of data. However, the company won’t estimate when holographic storage will become readily available, saying that price/performance considerations mean the system will not emerge from the lab just yet. Independent estimates suggest that to be commercially viable a terabyte system would need to cost around $30,000. StorageTek is also working on tape technology – promising to introduce metal evaporated (ME) tape by 2003, which will produce an even thinner coating than the current metal particulate process. The new process will also produce an extremely granular coating allowing more data to be captured. Mel Taylor, business development manager, sees technologies such as ME extending the lifecycle of the medium well into the next century, stressing that for low to medium cost systems tape and disk will still be the obvious answer. One benefit to the company in developing its own solutions to storage problems is that it may make more money from the media – raw tape – itself. For instance, the company’s previous tape drives were clones of IBM Corp’s 3480 and 3490 mainframe tape drives. The 9840 tape drive the company has just introduced (CI No 3,566) is not compatible with the venerable IBM models.
