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Jun 27, 2010 - 17:49 Banking on bunkers in the Swiss Alps Sheltered deep within the Bernese Oberland, two old military bunkers now serve as maximum security vaults for the use of an international clientele. Swiss Fort Knox borrows its name from the Kentucky version, which happens to be the home of the United States Bullion Depository. The focus is on secure data storage in the resort towns of Saanen and Zweisimmen, but it’s safe to say that just about anything could find a well-guarded home in the bedrock. With men in black fatigues, numerous checkpoints and alarm systems plus...

Chemists in Japan have created the first material that can undergo a photoreversible transition from metal to semiconductor. The breakthrough heralds applications in ultra high density data storage, with 500 times the density of a Blu-ray disc.The past decade has seen a growing interest in ways to switch the physical properties of matter. Temperature and pressure can both turn materials, say, from insulators to metals, or from non-magnetic to magnetic, but they are difficult to control in complex memory devices. As a result, researchers have been looking at photoinduced phase transitions, for which the key stimulus is laser light. Recently, laser...

Sources close to Seagate roadmaps have leaked the potential of a 3TB SAS drive being released this year.The quest for storage is almost a never ending saga.  Dubbed the Constellation-ES, the replacement for the Seagate Barracuda-ES, the drive is expected to arrive later this year with a 7200 RPM rotation speed, and a 6Gbit/s SAS interface.  A 1TB version of the 2.5" Barracuda-ES is also expected to arrive around the mid year point.

To passersby, the squat two-story building in Totowa might look like a vacant office park. There are no signs of activity, save a few cars dotting the parking lot. But inside the gated facility, workers are preparing to build a server farm the size of a football field — outfitted with miles of fiber-optic wiring and hundreds of computers — to store data for Wall Street financial firms some 20 miles away. As New York City’s financial services industry struggles to cut back on IT spending, many companies are turning to data centers in New Jersey like this one, which...

Enlarge ImageNever forget. Microscopic iron crystals moving within carbon nanotubes could hold computer data permanently. Credit: Zettl Research Group/LBNL/UC Berkeley That embarrassing home movie of you naked in the tub could still be around millions of years from now, along with your less-than-eloquent posts on Facebook and Twitter. Researchers have developed a new technology based on carbon nanotubes that promises to permanently preserve individual bits of data, such as those found on computer hard drives and DVDs. If so, the technology could lead to data archives holding the entirety of human thought and communications potentially forever. As our technological...

Enlarge ImageColor code. A new data-storage technique encodes multiple sets of data in the same area using different colors and polarizations of light.Credit: Adapted from Peter Zijlstra et al., Nature 459, 410 (2009) Better clear a shelf in your basement for that high-end Blu-ray DVD player you just bought. Researchers report that they can boost the amount of data stored on a disc 10,000-fold by using gold nanoparticles. If commercialized, the technology could allow a single disc to hold as many as 300 movies or 250,000 songs. Today's CDs and DVDs store data as a string of pits burned...

DVDs are set to explore new dimensions.Punchstock Spreading into extra dimensions could help next-generation DVDs to store even more data than they currently do. The new technique could squeeze around 140 times the capacity of the best Blu-rays into a standard-sized disk. Traditional DVDs and Blu-ray disks store data in two dimensions, and there's been a recent push to increase their capacity by creating multi-layered disks that store data across three dimensions. But, asks James Chon at the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, why stop there?Chon and his colleagues are stepping into hyperspace, by encoding information in two...

Scientists successfully store "e=mc2 1905" on DNA of living matterFebruary 27, 2007 (Computerworld) -- A Japanese university announced scientists there have developed a new technology that uses bacteria DNA as a medium for storing data long-term, even for thousands of years. Keio University Institute for Advanced Biosciences and Keio University Shonan Fujisawa Campus announced the development of the new technology, which creates an artificial DNA that carries up to more than 100 bits of data within the genome sequence, according to the JCN Newswire. The universities said they successfully encoded "e= mc2 1905!" -- Einstein's theory of relativity and the...

Storage expert warns of short life span for burned CDs And don't count on hard disk drives for long-term storage, either News Story by John Blau JANUARY 10, 2006 Although opinions vary on how to preserve data on digital storage media, such as optical CDs and DVDs, Kurt Gerecke, a physicist and storage expert at IBM Deutschland GmbH, takes this view: If you want to avoid having to burn new CDs every few years, use magnetic tapes to store all your pictures, videos and songs for a lifetime. "Unlike pressed original CDs, burned CDs have a relatively short life...

Seagate Unleashes Technology to Power 100+ Terabyte HDDs HAMR from Seagate to Allow 100TB Storage Solutions by Anton Shilov03/25/2004 | 07:49 AM Seagate Technology on Thursday is presenting research findings pointing toward data storage densities of 50 terabits per square inch or more at the American Physical Society (APS) conference. The move could eventually enable astonishingly large storage products.At 50 terabits (Tb) per square inch densities, over 3.5 million high-resolution photos, 2800 audio CDs, 1600 hours of television, or the entire printed collection of the US Library of Congress could be stored onto recording media about the size of a single...