Holographic Storage by Christmas?

Looks like it could be a reality. We may not get our flying cars or our robot butlers, but by jimminy we'll have holographic storage.

Won't be cheap, sadly, but new tech never is:

Holographic storage uses a patented two-chemistry Tapestry photopolymer write-once material. The recording material is 1.5 mm thick and is sandwiched between two 130 mm diameter transmissive plastic substrates. Last year, InPhase indicated that the first incarnation of the InPhase technology would be used for archival purposes, and D'Ambrise indicated that that will still be the case: media will be roughly $120 to $180 apiece, and drives will cost about $15,000.

Ars Technica, as usual, has good coverage.

cool stuff :)
It's always fun to try and speculate which of these technologies will be able to grab a niche on the market, and which of those will be able to hold on to it for a few years.
There's a lot of hubbub about storage - see hddvd and bluray, and I think I remember other relatively recent breakthroughs in storage technology - although they are still at the research/prototype stage.

But, nevertheless, it _will_ be interesting to see how all this develops.
It's also pretty funny to think that I can remember times when I was using floppy disks to carry around a few hundred kilobytes of data, and now I measure my home desktop storage capacity in terabytes... :laugh4:

Can someone explaing the subject.. (I waited for people to reply, but there seem to be few..)

In the simplest terms, you're still talking about a disc and a laser for storage, but instead of reading pits in a mylar or similar surface (the way CDs and DVDs work now) the laser would be reading some sort of holographic data burned to the disc. This is a big deal because it will increase storage densities. A single holographic disk (using the tech announced here) will net you about 300 gigs, which is as big as many hard drives. The next size increase would be 800 gigs, then 1.6 terabytes. On a single disk.

So this means you could, in theory, back up your entire hard drive on a single optical disk. Not right away, of course, since the tech is going to be prohibitively expensive for a while, but that was true when the first CD burners and DVD burners came along.

The important thing is that this tech will be shipping, and the price only goes down from there. Very exciting stuff.

Single Layer DVD is approx $1 and 6GB. So about 20 cents a Gig.

While this media will be $180 and 300GB. So about 60 cents a Gig.

The write speed would be interesting... and the need for a fully fiber backbone at least between the file server cluster and the backup drive... if the burner is small enough then I assume it could replase DVD backup drives... it may though be rather large and take up a fair bit of rackspace.

Very intersting indeed.

Now if only the Hollywood and RIAA trolls would stay away from this hardware, life would be good. But I bet lobbying for DRM in these begins well before they're anywhere near available to the public...:furious3: