optical magnetic storage (O-Mass)

O-Mass technology (Optical Magnetic Storage) is a technology for mass data storage developed by the Tandberg subsidiary O-Mass.

O-Mass technology offers itself as an alternative to tape drives and combines the advantages of magnetic tape recording with those of optical reading. As with other tape drives, several tracks are magnetized on the magnetic tape. During readout, the individual tracks are scanned with lasers. The reflected laser beams are split in a splitter and projected onto a detector, where the light information is converted. The optical sensor determines the track width.

The storage capacity of the first O-Mass drives is 1.2 terabytes( TB), with further developments with up to 20 TB announced. Data transfer rates are 64 MB/s for the 1.2 TB version and are expected to increase to 1 GB/s.