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Optostore’s CTO, Joachim Cantauw, says the present prototype can pack 2 terabytes (20 million CDs) of data per crystal. They’re testing 10 terabytes in a successor. The rate of data transfer is 12.5 MB per second, which they’re hoping to rev up to 100. The company says it’s running beta tests with five customers, including a major German media company that wants to archive its 6,000 films. Another is a bank that wants to store all its documents, plus an Internet provider that’s looking to store a lot of Web pages. If all goes well, a commercial version would hit the market some time in 2002.
The idea isn’t new. IBM has been working on crystal data storage off and on for almost 30 years, but its technology has never left the lab. Lucent Technologies is also readying a hologram-based system, but it uses a polymer disk instead of crystal. The advantage of crystal is that it can survive with the data intact for a hundred years or more, while polymer — the same material used for CDs and DVDs — has a life expectancy of 15 years or less.
Designed for shipment in a padded envelope, the crystals are heat, water and acid-proof. If the building burns down and you can dig the crystals out of the ashes, your data will be safe. All the data in the world would fit securely into two shoe boxes’ worth of crystals, Cantauw says. How much of that would be actual wisdom? We’ll leave it to others to decide.
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