Sony just announced that cassette technology might be the future! With a device that can hold 185 terabytes on one tape. (that's three bluray discs worth of data per square inch.)
"We live in a world where digital information is exploding. Some 90% of the world’s data was generated in the past two years. The obvious question is: how can we store it all? In Nature Communications today, we, along with Richard Evans from CSIRO, show how we developed a new technique to enable the data capacity of a single DVD to increase from 4.7 gigabytes up to one petabyte (1,000 terabytes). This is equivalent of 10.6 years of compressed high-definition video or 50,000 full high-definition movies."
Just think about it for a moment: One gram of DNA can store 700 terabytes of data. That’s 14,000 50-gigabyte Blu-ray discs… in a droplet of DNA that would fit on the tip of your pinky. To store the same kind of data on hard drives — the densest storage medium in use today — you’d need 233 3TB drives, weighing a total of 151 kilos. In Church and Kosuri’s case, they have successfully stored around 700 kilobytes of data in DNA — Church’s latest book, in fact — and proceeded to make 70 billion copies (which they claim, jokingly, makes it the best-selling book of all time!) totaling 44 petabytes of data stored. [more inside]
Sustainability of Digital Formats : a repository of mostly technical information about digital content file formats related to storing images (moving and still), text, sound and websites
Attention data archivists... CD-R's go bad. A dutch study indicates that most CD-Recordable discs become virtually unreadable 20 months after being written.
5GB on a Credit Card. The ever shrinking world of data storage just got smaller, as a company called StorCard has apparently invented a way to write up to 5GB worth of data on to media the size & shape of a credit card. Along with the media you have to buy a USB adaptor to read, but it's a quantum leap in data storage either way. Where will this madness end? Five GB on the head of a pin???
Nüp2 Incorporated will revolutionize the electronic memory business. Using our patented memory technology and our patent-pending "Topolithographic" manufacturing process, we will develop and produce solid-state electronic memory having gigabytes of storage in a tiny package for just a few dollars per Gigabyte. Hoax? Vaporware? Revolution in data storage? You decide.
I knew hard drive storage was cheap, but I didn't think it was that cheap. Freediskspace.com is offering 300Mb of storage for pretty much anything. They integrate with PCs, Macs, and Linux boxes, in addition to PDAs. That last one I find most curious, because I've never maxed out the storage space on my 2Mb palm pilot before. [thanks bump]