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InPhase launches holographic storage
Author: Gareth HalfacreePublished: 28th April 2008
The Tapestry drive uses 12cm plastic discs capable of storing 300GB - with future units stretching to 1.6TB.
InPhase Technologies has been promising 300GB discs for eight years now, but if a report over at ZDNet is to be believed they might finally be making good and delivering a usable product.
The Tapestry drive uses 12cm plastic discs to store up to 300GB of data in holographic form – and unlike CDs and DVDs, the company is confident that the data will remain readable for a minimum of fifty years. With current-generation optical storage becoming unreadable after a little as five years due to unstable phase-change dyes, and even high-end tape-based magnetic storage degrading before the half-century mark, it's quite a leap forward.
At the prices InPhase are talking about – you'll need to find £9,000 to buy the drive and then around £90 per disc if you buy in bulk – the device is clearly aimed at replacing tape backup systems such as the LTO Ultrium series. The latest Ultrium standard, LTO3, stores 400GB per tape compared to Tapestry's 300GB, and is significantly faster – but is incapable of random access to data, and would require refreshing long before the fifty year lifespan of the Tapestry media is up.
The company are clearly looking to the future, too: the next iteration of Tapestry will store 800GB and write at a rate of 80MB/s, and when they've licked that they'll start work on a 1.6TB unit capable of 120MB/s writing. Which would blow pretty much every traditional backup system out of the water, frankly.
While the prices would have to get significantly lower before anyone would consider holographic storage a mass-market technology, it's nice to see that the company can deliver on what certainly sounds like the future of removable storage.
What's your take on holographic storage – is it a likely to make an impact on the desktop, or will it end up a datacentre-only toy? Share your thoughts over in the forums.
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Comments (17)Stats: 0.125 seconds
hopefully this isn't going to be another duke nukem forever.
I know that I'm probably not alone, having 15 HDD's in the house, with just under 2TB of data on.
Obviously the most essential data is on DVD-R also, but what about the rest of it? It would be a pain if a couple of drives went down, definitely!
AIT tapes arent the best really, LTO is the better technology.
Id rather trust my data to a tape backup than an external hdd
LTO4 is available and has an 800GB native capacity
There is also 500GB Storagetek T10000, 700GB IBM 1120 amongst others, I can't see where their market is tbh.
By the time their 1.6TB disk comes out, tape media will have outgrown it by a fair margin.
Nice to see holographic storage finally making an appearance at any rate :D
robustness.
i think....
Tapes are used for backups (as far as i know) - but the longevity argument applies more to archiving
I expect your rolling backup tape will be overwritten within a year or 2 (if not month(s))
oops, sorry accidentally pressed the post comment, couldnt find an edit button, anyway, i really like this line :D
erm my understanding was that quantum computers would theoreticly be able to take a problem like checking if a number as a factor of another number and in the time taken to try one number try every posible number because they (depending on interpritation) made use of the paralism of universes and did the same computation in an infinite number of universes a single time. I fail to see how quantum computers will help transfer data more efectivly. The write time seems to be more of the minimum exposure time to imprint a bit in the holographic medium rather than a "back end problem". After all sata is capable of 300Gb/s theoretical maximum and other interfaces like hypertransport are capable of even more.
In other words WTF man????