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By Richard Morochove
First published September 30, 1999
SAN FRANCISCO - How much data can you store on a compact flash card, a tiny package little bigger than the size of a quarter? Until recently, my answer ended in megabytes. But now I'm off by several orders of magnitude.
At last week's Extreme Storage event, Hewlett-Packard publicly unveiled its work on atomic resolution storage (ARS), a technology that allows 10 gigabytes of data to be stored on a tiny compact flash card. To put that into perspective, that's more data than can be stored on the hard drives of most home PCs today.
ARS works by using a focused stream of energy to quickly heat and change the structure of a small section of matter, just a few atoms across.
"Today,
in optical recording, the limitation is not the material, it's the optics,"
said Marvin Keshner, Director Information Storage Technology Lab for
Hewlett-Packard. "We can only make a spot as small as the wavelength of
light.
"We've already made spots with electrons that are way smaller than that. We really don't know how small we can go, but there's no reason to believe we can't get down to the ten or twenty atom diameter spot."
ARS reads like a slice of science fiction, so perhaps it's no surprise the people at HP call Keshner the Yoda of storage.
Yet ARS sounds eminently practicable. It takes very little power to store
data using this technology and even less to read it back. While Keshner wouldn't
specify the cost of the atomic storage, it will be fairly inexpensive.
Keshner says ARS will be used in digital appliances where the complete device will sell for under $200 (U.S.). One can imagine a video camera the size of a couple of credit cards and a recording capacity of four hours of compressed video.
It would be ideal for a small, Palm-like device that stores all the information you'd need while mobile, including maps and a directory listing all the phone numbers you need to know. Or you could carry a handheld digital music player that contains all the music you like, more than 100 CDs of music.
I don't know about you, but I'm ready to buy. Unfortunately, it will take a few more years before ARS makes it out of the HP labs and into the stores.
Something that's closer to a shipping reality is a truly compatible re-writable DVD, one that you could write on any computer or video recorder and then play back on any other DVD device.
That doesn't sound like a remarkable accomplishment. However, due to the way the DVD was introduced, as a shotgun marriage between different formats, it turns out to be rather difficult to design a way to record a DVD that's compatible with the playback format. You need to allow for minute variances in recording speeds, gaps for multi-session recordings and other issues.
We've been spoiled by the CD format, which was very tightly controlled by Sony and Philips, the originators of that format. The two were so far in advance of their competitors that they were able to use their edge in technology to ensure compatibility. If other firms wanted to use the Sony and Philips patents, then they were not allowed to create incompatibilities in the CD format.
Future developments in DVD+RW include using a blue laser, which allows about 2.5 times the data density of the conventional red laser. This will permit 15 or 20 gigabytes of storage on one disc.
New optical drives announced by Hewlett-Packard last week include the 9000 series of CD-Writers that write at 8x speed, re-write at 4x and read at 32x.
An interesting new device from HP called CD-Writer Music is designed specifically to make it easy to record music downloaded from the Internet in MP3 format. It uses recording media that costs a little extra since it incorporates royalties that will be paid to the music companies and recording artists.
However, CD-Writer Music will not be available in Canada, at present. The sticking point is the royalty arrangements.
The Canadian Copyright Board is still mulling over the whopping $2.50 levy the Canadian music industry wants to tack on to the cost of each recordable CD. This amount would more than double the cost of a CD, regardless of whether it's used for data backup or music recording.
I'm still astounded by how easily the music industry lobbyists persuaded our representatives in Ottawa to stick this levy into law. I know some people illegally photocopy this column, but I don't propose that the price of paper be doubled and the extra profits handed over to me and other writers as compensation for lost royalties.
The CD levy was supposed to go into effect earlier this year. The largest petition in Canadian Internet history forced a reconsideration of the charge. CW
Richard Morochove, FCA, is a Toronto-based computer consultant.
Copyright ©1999 by Morochove & Associates Inc. All rights reserved. This work may not be copied or distributed by any means without our prior written permission.
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