Current hard drive technology works by storing information on the surface of the disc, and it's rapidly approaching the point where squeezing more information on a single platter is going to be impossible with current techniques.
Enter holographic storage, a new technique that stores informations in three dimensions on the surface of a polymer, with excellent results in terms of storage density. This hitherto purely theoretical technique is going to be put to good use by Optware, a Japanese corporation, who is expecting to have gone through three generations of its products by the end of 2006, and who aims to break the Tetrabyte barrier by 2008 - a tall order, if you will excuse the 3D-related pun.
Head over to Computerworld to read more about Optware's plans for hard drive world domination, and try not to drool too much thinking about that tetrabyte of X-rated pictures all on one disc.
http://www.computerworld.com/hardwar...105682,00.html
parallel processing seems like such a cop-out, but i guess its necessary to change software engineering to a multithreaded world view before hopefully, we jump onto newer technologies.
