Holographic Storage Crams in 0.5TB Per Square Inch

An anonymous reader writes "VNUNet is reporting that a company called InPhase Technologies claims they have successfully recorded 515GB of data per square inch to capture the record for highest data density. From the article: 'InPhase promised to begin shipping the first holographic drive and media later this year. The first generation drive has a capacity of 300GB on a single disk with a 20Mbps transfer rate. The first product will be followed by a family ranging from 800GB to 1.6TB capacity.'"

Comments

GigaBITs

[Namarrgon]

515 Gb is only 64 GB. So about 4.6 square inches of data surface on a 300 GB disc.

Extremely slow transfer rate

[iammaxus]

With a 300GB capacity and 20Mbps tansfer rate, it would take 34 hours to read or write a single disk. Assuming they made a mistake in the transfer rate and its actually 20MBps (possible though unlikely considering HD-DVD drives are shipping with 35mbps, or ~4MBps rates), it would still take ~4 hours to transfer a disc. I can burn a 700MB CD in 5 minutes, and a 4.7GB DVD in 25 minutes.

Re:Data Rate?

[Hektor_Troy]

From the InPhase press release:

InPhase will be the first company to deliver a holographic product for professional archive applications in late 2006. The media for this product will be offered through its strategic partner Hitachi Maxell Ltd. The initial InPhase Tapestry holographic recording device will record 300 gigabytes (GB) of data onto a 130 mm disc with a transfer rate of 20 megabytes per second (MB/s). This is compatible with high-definition television transmission rates, and high-end enterprise computer applications.

Re:Not at 20Mbps

[StikyPad]

I noticed that too, and I suspect the author meant MB/s, which is supported by the actual press release:

The first generation drive has a capacity of 300 gigabytes on a single disk with a 20 megabyte per second transfer rate.

The write transfer rate is determined by the time required to position the laser at the correct angular address, the speed of the shutter, the laser power, and the exposure time. In this demonstration the average exposure time per page was 2.7 milliseconds, which translates into a user write transfer rate of 23 megabytes per second.

Re:Not that competitive.

[OzRoy]

It's not a HDD replacement. It's a CD/DVD replacement. So imagine something that looks like a floppy disc holding 300G of data.

Also remember that this is the first product to use this technology. In a few years we will look back on this and think about how amazingly slow it is, and how slow it is.