Posted: May 07, 2017 10:16 am
LjSpike wrote:DavidMcC wrote:This technology has the problem of requiring many detectors instead of only one, and, if your suggestion of multiple wavelengths is also implemented, a broad-band laser source (or multiple sources) would also be required. Sounds like a potential electronic equivalent of a "hangar queen" to me, and a very expensive beast to boot.
Guess so. It's just a brief idea I had. For monochromatic though the detectors wouldn't have to be incredibly elaborate, it'd just be a small LDR per detector. Set up 3 detectors and your already have 6561 digits per byte as a base-3 system. If you count none of the detectors receiving the light as data too then you have base-4 giving 65536 digits per byte, doubling data density (as you would require 2 bytes to store that). You could also achieve a higher read speed I presume than if using a normal HDD?
There is a further issue, that a high degree of directional filtering/discrimination would be needed for each detector to avoid cross-talk, probably making the system physically rather large as well as complex.