If you take the guts of a Blu-ray or DVD player, blow it up, and spread it across a work bench, it looks like this. So you might be surprised to know that you're looking at the future of storage.
A laser beam whose wavelength is being monitored by this Soviet-looking machine is being bounced from mirror to mirror to mirror before it lands on a spinning disc the size of CD, but orange, and transparent. It's reading the holograms that are embedded buried inside the disc, gigabytes of random test data.
This work table is deep inside the labyrinthine complex that is GE's Global Research Lab, 550 acres of big machines and big brains, in the hinterlands of Niskayuna, New York. It's where the company that brought us 30 Rock invents the future of energy, aviation, healthcare, and dozens of other mega-industries, including, as it turns out, data storage.
Data storage is something most people don't spend much time thinking about, and if we do, it's in abstract terms. Laptops have a fixed amount of space; we pay for more, but accept less. DVDs hold a certain length of video, or a healthy chunk of a music collection; these are disposable. Flash drives move stuff from one place to another; we sense that they're different than hard drives; but we're not sure how.
What we know is that we need to store stuff, somewhere. And by we, I mean we: our network infrastructure won't be ready for widespread cloud computing, or that fantasy of downloading everything you'll ever watch in full HD, for a very, very long time, and until then—or for people with unease about that concept, even then—storage is something we need to think about.
In 2010, storage tech is in flux. Here's how we—and the people and companies we're slowly (but surely) handing our data over to, store stuff now, and more importantly, later.
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