Start-up shows off 140 gigabyte disk technology

Silicon Valley has long been the center of the universe when it comes to data storage technology with IBM’s Storage Products Division, Seagate, Maxtor, and Quantum among the industry’s leading players. This week, C3D, a company started by Russian and Israeli entrepreneurs held a conference in San Jose to show off a new data storage technology that would improve the data capacity of a typical CD-ROM disc by 200-fold!

C3D (www.C-3d.net) claims its disks can store 140 gigabytes of data, enough for 30 two-hour movies. A small credit card-size device will hold 10 gigabytes. Products using the technology could be on the market as early as late next year, C3D officials said.

The main purpose of the San Jose event was to generate interest among the major disk drive manufacturers. Rather than marketing the technology itself, C3D hopes to get large market players to license the technology for which C3D claims to have 40 patents that have either been granted or are pending. The C3D technology is similar to that used in current CD-ROM and DVD drives in which a laser reads reflected light. But the C3D drives use the laser’s light beam to read reflections coming from fluorescent material embedded in layers in the disc. C3D claims it can currently handle up to 20 such layers, and eventually as many as 100. In the high-capacity format, the C3D technology is read-only, like regular CD-ROM disks. In a lower-capacity mode, the technology also allows for up to 4 gigabytes of data to be written (once) onto the disks.