[NTLK] Archival Storage (was: Storage card specifications)

Bradley Loeding bradley.loeding at gmail.com
Fri Apr 8 19:55:22 EDT 2011


I totally agree, of all the data storage technologies for archival purposes,
MO is the way to go. It is huge in Japan and Asia, but you rarely here about
it in the States. I've got an old NeXT slab with one. It's rock solid
reliable.

The next gen of MO is the UDO & UDO2 formats holding 30GB & 60GB
receptively. Unfortunately, the format never took off in the enterprise so
it's future is a bit uncertain. Apparently, there is very little market for
ultra reliable storage.

-Bradley


On Fri, Apr 8, 2011 at 11:58 AM, Robert Stewart <
robertdylanstewart at gmail.com> wrote:

> Magneto-optical media has an incredible shelf-life due to the way it works.
> Essentially, the drive uses a laser to heat tracks on the disk to their
> Curie point, thereby wiping any magnetic alignment. While the material is
> cooling, it then uses an electromagnet to hold the cooling bits in the
> desired state. When it cools, the disk is effectively composed of permanent
> magnets. That's why the disks don't have a problem around magnets that would
> eat floppies. They're read using the Kerr effect with the same laser running
> at a lower power.
>



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