Tomorrow's Storage Today: Holographic Drive to Debut in May

While it's been on the list of technologies that have been "right around the corner" for many years (joining hydrogen cars and jet packs to name just two), holographic data storage is about to make its debut in the marketplace in May. Holographic storage has been a bit of a Holy Grail as its method of writing data to disc as light patterns in three dimensions can store hundreds of gigabytes of data onto a disc the size of a standard DVD/CD. (In comparison, a Blu-ray disc can only hold 25 GB on a single layer.)

Robin Harris over at ZDNet's Storage Bits blog explains how this technology works and one of its most interesting features:

Holograms use 2 coherent laser beams - a reference beam and an illumination beam - to create an interference pattern that is recorded on photo sensitive media. Shine a laser on the recorded interference pattern and the original image is reconstructed in glorious 3D. As the laser moves around - or you do - you see the image from different perspectives.
[...]
Another factor: photographic media has the longest proven lifespan - over a century - of any modern media. Since there's no physical contact you can read the media millions of times with no degradation.

InPhase Technologies is set to release its first holographic-based storage device in May, dubbed the Tapestry, and it touts a disc capacity of 300 GB with up to 50 years of archive life--which certainly kicks butt over the usual 2 to 3 years I've been getting from my hard drives. And Richard Grigonis over at TMCnet adds:

The Tapestry can handle a 20 MBps-120 MBps transfer rate and can access data in milliseconds. It's less expensive than any magnetic hard drive RAID solution. The device supports four levels of error correction, so you won't be losing any data unless you nuke the device or throw it into an active volcano.

However, as per usual, there's a price to pay for early adoption, and this one's a doozy: $18,000 for the Tapestry drive and $180 for the 300 GB discs. Suffice it to say, my wife can breathe a sigh of relief to know that this won't be coming home with me any time soon. But it's definitely an exciting step into the future (if you're one, like me, who gets excited over data storage).

~Agen G.N. Schmitz 

Comments

[fijidaddy]

u guys need to enable mod rewrite for the non www url for your site....we get a server error for entering enduserblog.com, c'mon tell your developers to chop chop...conanical style..

[My Awesome Blog]

I'm still waiting for someone to invent the holodeck ;)

[Aric A.]

@fijidaddy: We're working on it. First day jitters. :) Should be fixed here in a bit.

[Rob]

geez... that's expensive. Surely it can't cost that much...

[Ken Mitchell]

Writes Aric A: "geez... that's expensive. Surely it can't cost that much..."

"Emergent" technologies are frequently hideously expensive. About 15 years ago, when portable CD writers were first available, they were $25K; ten years ago, DVD writers were about that much. The costs of tech fall precipitously after a couple of years; if the costs of bread and milk had followed the prices of computers, you'd be able to buy a lifetime supply of bread and a barrel of milk for a quarter.

Give it a year, perhaps 18 months. The price will be quite reasonable. A year after that, they'll have terabyte disks at three-for-$10 at Wal-mart.

[ArtD0dger]

Ken is exactly right, if a bit optimistic about the schedule. The price of these devices will fall precipitously, and the capacity will rise quickly.

Another thing that's worth noting is that the storage media itself is potentially very inexpensive. It's basically just a layer of photopolymer sandwiched in clear plastic and enclosed in a light-tight cartridge. Once the economies of scale kick in, the cost of storing your next terabyte will be very low indeed. And the archive life is long because the data are stored using irreversible chemical reactions rather than metastable magnetic domains.

[Mike]

Yep. Look at how quickly harddrives have come down in price. Just 6 months ago, 1TB harddrives were in the $350 range. Now they're down to around $220 depending on where you look.

[Mark Stouffer]

It's sort of like pharmacueticals. The first pill costs $10,000,000. The second one costs 50¢. But I think it will be something like 5 years before it's down in my range of a couple-three hundred. And who knows what storage will be around then? 100 gig thumb drives?

[Barb]

This will be great for storage concerns - but will they make it an internal drive? It looks good for a server room big and bulky, but the photographic media is an interesting concept to build this around.

[Engineering]

Price will come down...