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

Storage takes the lead

[Hao Wu]

Thus pulling ahead of bandwidth issues - it is once again faster to send data by the US Postal Service, considering stuff in terabyte units.

Raw capacity doesn't matter

[syntaxglitch]

Well, it really doesn't. The only people who NEED terabytes or more can already afford that much in hard drives. But that's mostly what the summary mentions. That and data density by physical size... which isn't really that important.

What I want to know is, how does this technology stack up against hard drives or other existing technologies on issues like
- Data read speed
- Data write speed
- Power consumption
- Heat and/or noise
- Size and complexity of read/write mechanism
- Resistance to physical damage
- Rate of data decay

...and so on. Those areas are where advances could REALLY make a difference.

Re:Media Format Battle

[YU Nicks NE Way]

Not really. BluRay and HD-DVD discs can be mass produced in R/O form. This won't be a replacement for either of those technologies unless it's possible to create multi-million impression runs on an assembly line -- which it currently isn't.

Re:Not that competitive.

[cryptoz]

Keep in mind that the summar is completely wrong. By a factor of 8. The drive is not half a terabyte, it's half a terabit. There's a difference. Same thing with the transfer speeds. It's no wonder that the general population is confused about storage space when a slashdot article gets it flat out wrong.