APRIL 24--The Optical Storage Technology Association (OSTA; Santa Barbara, CA: www.osta.org), an international trade association that promotes the use of recordable optical technologies and products, reports that shipments of 9.1-Gbyte (14X) magneto-optical (MO) 5.25-in.-disk products have begun. By integrating these high-capacity storage products into automated storage products, such as jukeboxes and libraries, system integrators can realize accessible storage capacities of multiple terabytes.
The 9.1-Gbyte technology is supported by numerous suppliers, such as DISC, Hewlett-Packard, Maxoptic, Plasmon, Sony, and Verbatim, as well as several applications software suppliers. It also provides full backward read compatibility with all previous 5.25-in.-disk MO capacities, such as the existing 5.2- and 2.6-Gbyte products.
Key technology features include a data-transfer rate of up to 6 Mbytes/s, 25-ms average seek time, 660-nm laser diode, 0.575 numerical-aperture objective lens, 0.3-µm/bit linear bit density, 0.65-µm track pitch, and a 3.3-Gbit/in.2 aerial bit density--a 75% increase over 5.2-Gbyte technology.
Magneto-optical technology continues to provide high reliability, ruggedness, fast performance, and the option of either a rewritable format or a write-once read-many format through the use of continuous-composite-write technology.
The new 9.1-Gbyte-storage technology is expected to become a European Computer Manufacturers Association standard this summer. The OSTA technology roadmap for MO storage is available at www.osta.org/html/mig/mo.gif.
