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Plasmon Develops "Selective
Destruction" Optical Drive
Friday, August 29, 2005
What if you had a large disc with a lot of data
on it and you needed to delete just a small
piece of data and you prefered it to be never
be recoverable again? That would probably require
a lot of hassle and to avoid that, because certainly
in companies they hate hassle, Plasmon has developed
a system that can destroy only a small part
of an optical disc, making it impossible to
get the data that was on that part back, while
still being able to use the rest of the disc.
The system is based on UDO. This format is based
on something similar to blue-laser technology.
UDO discs are vomr in cartridges that are almost
identical to Magneto Optical (MO) discs which
means it's possible to mix and match MO and
UDO drives in the same library.
UDO is a phase-change optical storage system.
In such systems, data is stored by changing
the state of the disc's recording layer between
amorphous and crystalline. Such changes affect
the disc's reflectivity and it's this change
that is detected when data needs to be read
off the disc. In the compliant write once discs
data is selectively destroyed by changing the
entire state of an area occupied by a file into
the crystalline state.
"There is absolutely no trace of the original
data," said Dave DuPont, a U.S.-based spokesman
for U.K.-based Plasmon. "There is no way you
can get the data that was there. This is in
stark contrast to hard-disk drives where data
is overwritten and it's still possible to get
it back. We call our process data-shredding."
However, the system has been designed to leave
the file's meta data untouched so that a record
exists of what was there and makes it possible
to verify what has been destroyed.
This write-once media that can be partially
destruced will have a capacity of 30G bytes,
the same as the write-once and rewritable versions
of UDO, and will cost US$65 per disc. Read the
entire story here.
*Article courtesy o f Dan Bell and www.cdfreaks.com
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