Technology based on science fiction seems to come closer to life every day.  This morning, Information Week had a nice article about a British firm who have managed to cram 300GB on a single disk with 20mB/s throughput.  That’s cool!

What’s even cooler is that they think they will have disks ready for market later this year, with plans for disks as big as 1.6TB.

This is the holy grail for storage, IMHO.  Compact storage, unaffected by magfields and presumably most RFI fields, and hopefully cheaper as more is made.  I can’t wait until I can have a RAID array of these drives!

I’m a nut for digitizing things around the house — home movies, photos, documents.  Storage capacities and survivability like these drives promise is the key to digitally archiving a family and their history.  With enough interest by folks active in doing these kinds of historical preservation, families’ history could get more detailed, more than just a chart of begats and a shoebox of photos.  Video, audio, and stills could be storage in massive quantities.

That, for me, is the payoff of this kind of storage technology.  I’m looking forward to it!