History 2000: O-Mass Working on Half-Terabyte Cartridge

Tandberg Data has staked $3 million in a new wholly-owned subsidiary by the name of O-Mass A.S. to develop new storage tape products based on opto-magnetic technology.

Erik Solhjell, executive VP, CTO and technology alliances for the Norwegian firm, whom we encountered at Comdex, provided a few details on the new technology, based on a patent filed jointly by Tandberg and a Moscow-based professor, Eugene ll’Yashenko.

The idea is quite similar to Thomson-CSF’s Terabyte SDCR technology: writing to the tape will be effected with a matrix planar MR head, while reading will be undertaken by a magneto-optical head.

A possible product, said Solhjell, is a half-terabyte cartridge with a transfer rate greater than 60MB/s and average access time under 5s.

According to him, O-Mass is working on the project with the French company Hi-Star Technologies (once a Quantum consultant for tape activity) and should soon number some 15 employees.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 155 on December 2000 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.