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Holographic Storage Slated to Hit Market This Fall
prostoalex writes "The Guardian takes a look at the current developments in the world of holographic storage. Despite being available in research for over 40 years, the technology is getting commercialized only now, with InPhase Technologies launching its 600 GB write-once disk and a drive this fall. What avout the price? "The first holographic products are certainly not mass-market — a 600GB disc will cost around $180 (£90), and the drive costs about $18,000. Potential users include banks, libraries, government agencies and corporations.""
What kind of library has £9000 to spend on a single piece of computer hardware? It'd be substantially cheaper to buy a computer and four of those 1 TB hardisks that were mentioned yesterday, and they'd be rewritable!
Or they could spent the £9000 on, y'know, say... books.
FGD 135
for a high density archival format, but I can't see where this even comes close.
The manufacturer rates it at 50 year archival life, with no specifics about how that number was derived (is that an average? guaranteed for every piece of media? until an error rate of "x" is encountered? under what storage conditions?).
It's a proprietary solution, from a single startup company - what are the odds that a reader is going to exist in 50 years? Note that the manufacturer specifically warns of a lack of backward compatibility when they state "Drive is backward read compatible for three generations; 18-24 months between generations." Having an archive of data which is inaccessible doesn't get you much.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
I agree with the parent on this. At least it's not vapourware.
Always the same debate with new technologies, especially storage - too expensive, something else is better etc. etc. Goes all the way back to floppy disks vs. ethernet. The first hard drives were around 20Mb, and cost a lot more than the 15 or so floppies they replaced.
What would be great is if someone knowledgeable had a look at the technology and made an educated guess as to whether it will be cheap in mass production. I'm pretty sure the first CDR disks weren't cheap. Tapes still aren't that cheap given their simplicity and speed. A far more useful analysis would be whether this technology could be made cheap when mass produced. If it can then it is a contender, if not then it's a waste of time.