exploits

InPhase Technologies announced that they crushed the record of data capacity on 1 inch².
They could make enter 64.3 GB data, using an holographic disc, while the current magnetic solutions (hard drives) reach max 37.5 GB on 1 inch².

The CDs, DVDs and others current optical solutions contain data only on their surface, while the holographic discs can access it in 3 dimensions.The blue laser is separated in a signal beam and a reference beam, their crossing producing an hologram.

The signal beam contains the 0 and the 1, like dark (1) or white (0) pixels. When this signal is crossed with the reference beam, an hologram of a pixels 3D-array is printed on the photosensitive part of the disc. This array is called a "page" of data, the inPhase's discs containing about 1.3 million bits on a page.

The idea of holographic storage is not new (1960), but the needed optical technology has just been born these last years. The lasers became small and cheap enough.

InPhase foresees to launch a holographic disc-drive and a 300 GB disc at the end of the year, then a 800 GB disc in 2008 and another 1600 GB in 2010.


source : Technology review, April.
for those who do not know :

• 1 inch = 2,54 cm.
• 1 DVD contains 4.7 GB (giga-bytes) data by layer. The commercial DVDs generally have 2 layers, while the home-burned DVDs generally have only 1. A CD contains about 700 MB (mega-bytes), or 0.7 GB.
• to know the data capacity of your hard drive, under Windows, go into the workstation icon. Select the icon(s) that represent your(s) hard-drive(s), clic with the right button, then "properties".
• Computer science works (at the moment) only with 0's and 1's. The smallest data used by a computer is a bit, an element that can have the value 0 or 1, opened or closed, on or off. It's just a concept. No matter the physical implementation. On a CD for example, a "1" is a hole in the disc. In this article, a "1" is a dark pixel. A set of 8 bits is called a byte. Their association can be characters (abcd...), numbers, pixels and pictures, sounds, videos, etc.

Labels: exploits