Godzilla-Size Hard Drives

Star Wars Storage

The rebel spy who stole the Death Star's plans in Star Wars didn't sneak those plans out on 8-inch floppies that were common in the mid-1970s. He used a storage device the size of a credit card. For dramatic purposes, director George Lucas needed to invent a storage medium that was small enough to be hidden easily and audiences would believe could hold a detailed blueprint for a planet-size space station. The result: Princess Leia jammed a fictional equivalent of the world's first flash memory PC Card, containing the secret plans, into R2D2's card slot.

Flash memory, used to store digital camera photos, isn't the only storage technology that once seemed possible only in science fiction. In the not-too-distant future, we may head down to our local store to buy a solid-state or crystal-based hard drive--or, if one manufacturer has its way, a super-capacious hard drive of extraterrestrial origin.

Free Space: The Final Frontier

Remember the unlimited repository of information Captain Picard had at his fingertips? DiskOnChip drives, made of high-capacity memory chips like those in a PC's RAM, show promise as the storage medium of choice for future video-on-demand services, although this technology is prohibitively costly for the average user ($1395 buys you a 128MB EIDE FlashDisk, which is the largest size available). M Systems, the developer of DiskOnChip technology, is the only company we know of that sells such drives.

SUMMARY

DiskOnChip $11 to $22 per MB M Systems 510/413-5950 www.m-sys.com

The Last, Best Hope for Storage

Characters on the Babylon 5 TV series store, transport, and exchange immense amounts of data on small, translucent "data crystals." Coincidentally, scientists at IBM's Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California, have created a prototype device that uses a crystal to store data. Scientists in the lab discovered a way to manipulate the crystal's structure with lasers and store data three-dimensionally in holograms within the crystal's volume. The greatest benefit of holographic storage is that huge amounts of data locked in the crystal matrix can be accessed instantaneously. The iron-doped lithium niobate crystals are grayish in color and the size of Las Vegas dice. Although still in the experimental stage, they may one day replace hard drive platters as a storage medium.

The Truth Is Out There

Isn't this the plot of an old X-Files episode? Cranford, New Jersey­based American Computer Company is building what it claims is an alien-derived storage device. The small PC manufacturer says the prototype solid-state drive was designed using stolen government plans from an alien ship that allegedly crashed in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. The poker-chip­size Transcapacitor drive is said to store about 90GB of data (of Earth origin). We'll reserve judgment until we have a TCAP drive in the PC World Test Center, but until then you can read all about the drive on ACC's Web site.