Plasmon develops "selective destruction" optical drive

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.

Source: Techworld.com