InPhase Technologies Promises Holographic Drive in May

Anonymous Coward writes "After 8 years of effort, InPhase Technologies is shipping the world's first holographic disk drive next month. They showed it at this week's NAB. With a 300GB 5.25" disk cartridge and a 50-year media life, the Tapestry 300r is aimed at the video and film archive market. They've been promising this thing for so long I'd given up hope that they'd ever ship it!"

Comments

Re:Price

[EdIII]

Who is to say that they will not license the technology? If they go out of business, somebody stepped into to buy the assets. Technology patented? Patents disappear in 20 years (or they should).

How is the reader susceptible to magnetic fields again? We are talking about just the reader right? If you are referring to EMP blasts from something like a nuclear device, then the fact your holo reader is not working is the least of your problems. Not trying to be sarcastic (at least not totally), but how does EM affect any kind of CD/DVD/HOLO readers?

You are also forgetting the target market here. Somebody like Disney. Didn't we just hear that a FUCKING JANITOR found one of Disney's long lost films in Japan? When you have incredibly valuable content that you have created, and archiving process like this is well worth it. If they don't have working readers in 40 years, I would say they could afford to have a firm make one for them from the plans available on the Internet in 2058.

The technology itself is promising, and "lots of standard HD's" are not a better option, or safer. If you were to evaluate the total costs, standard HD's would cost your more in the long run to achieve the same level of reliability as this holographic technology.

You also need to remember, this is not like a hard drive. It does not have any proprietary IC components, no internal firmwares, no connectors, moving parts, etc. It is a solid piece of holographic material. If you take it out of the case and set it on a desk, you can SEE the data with your own eyes. To get the data back off into a computer system, simply requires some lasers and mathematical algorithms, which I would guess is going to be trivial in a few decades. A hard drive is NOT the same. If you took a 250 MEG HD from over 15 years ago and had to remove the platters, just how easy would it be to find parts that could read those platters again? Remember, the density has changed from 15 years ago. The internal parts and technology in hard drives is substantially different now. At least with Holographic media, you don't even have to TOUCH it. Just set it on top of some lasers and read it with whatever technology you have.

Re:Finally!

[shmlco]

You've obviously never had a backup tape or an old Zip or Jaz drive fail to read because of differences in track calibrations or read heads.

Re:Price

[wik]

If you want to learn more about this, I suggest Dr. Wilson's talk on InPhase's technology at CMU in November. It's a very accessible and interesting talk for someone who is not familiar with the field.