Holographic Storage Nearing Availability, At 150GB Per Disc

[Rob Williams]

From our front-page news:

Burn DVD's much? Ever curious about how long the data will remain on those discs? That's a common worry nowadays, and for good reason. If you burn precious family photos, you'd rather them be safe. Essentially, the only way to combat this going forward would be to re-burn our media as time passes, which would likely be to new media formats each time (given that we will likely be using a completely new media type every ten years).

Company InPhase has a solution to this problem though, albeit an expensive one. Their "holographic" storage system allows you to store upwards of 150GB per disc ($180 each) at a rather slow 20MBps. Slow, but InPhase promises that the discs can last upwards of 50 years. That's a lot, considering the shelf life of a standard DVD is much less. Not to mention that DVD's hold a lot less.

But if you are like me and refuse to pay the $18,000 for the recorder itself, then it's best to just take good care of your DVDs. The leading killer of optical media is having them lying around the house, or leaving them in direct sunlight. Storing them in a dark place and sealed off air-tight should prolong the life dramatically.

<table align="center"><tbody><tr><td>

</td></tr></tbody></table>
Questions over long-term backwards compatibility may also blunt Tapestry 300r sales. The company's literature states that the yet-to-be-released Tapestry 800r and 1600r will be backwards compatible with 300r discs, but does not state that the 300r will be able to read 800r and 1600r media once those discs are available.

Source: Ars Technica
​

 

[MacMan]

Just How Long Before.....

I wonder just how long it will take before this technology trickles down to the rest of us poor folk; how long before it becomes affordable? I remember the first DVD players were well over $1,500 at first, but before long, well... you know what I mean.

Even more important, how long before SSD drives come down in price? I love to see a large SSD drive in a computer like the MacBook Air. I can live without a DVD built-in, but the small 80 gigger is a no go for me!

 

[Rob Williams]

To be honest, I doubt we'll (regular consumer) will ever touch this. Right now, the technology is so early, that even in the article there it mentions that updated models are already on schedule to be released in a few years. Really hard to say, though.

The fact that the discs hold so much is fantastic, but the fact that they are so slow isn't. 20MBps isn't horrible, but it would take so long to burn just one disc.

So whether or not we see this in our own hands is hard to say. Even seeing Blu-ray discs go way down in price would be nice. They hold upwards of 25GB at a minimum, so that in itself would be a huge advantage over the standard DVD.

I think it goes without saying right now though, that the ultimate backup solution is another hard drive. 500GB drives can be had for just around $100, and at that point, it's far less expensive than these discs. And as far as I know, hard drives don't lose their data like discs do, part in thanks to their closed-off chassis. Not positive though...

 

[Merlin]

Who knows what type of system will be next.
We had, at one time, the 5.25 floppy disk that was fantastic with 1.2 mb....then the small floppy that held a whopping 1.44 mb.
Then the CD writer that amazed us with 700 mb......
And we almost fainted at the DVD drives that had 4 to 8 gigs, depending on double sided or dual layer,
And here lately the BlueRay disk writer with 25/50 gigs.....

Now what do we do with the 5.25 floppies that we stored all our black and white photos.
No mattter what we want to do, we can expect the technology will change for another storage type, then we have to transfer everything over to the new system.
( I still have the white album on vinyl )

:techgage::techgage: Merlin :techgage::techgage: