Company claims holographic disk breakthrough

[TheHawks]

InPhase Technologies reckons it can squeeze 200 gigabits on a single square inch of optical disk. This company showed off its holographic prototype at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) convention in Las Vegas this week InPhase said is uses a patented polytopic recording method to squeeze 300 gigabytes (GB) capacity on a single disk. It says that by 2009 it will be selling disks with up to 1.6 terabyte (TB) capacity.

http://www.inphase-tech.com/

INQUIRER

[nesman]

If that was from anywhere but the Inquirer, I'd be really happy to see it.

On the other hand, I don't think that the numbers are too farfetched. I don't think they'll be ready for the public by then, but I wouldn't be surprised if somebody in some lab had a working prototype by 2009. It'll take a year or 3 before anybody can afford them though.

[Rat]

It'll take a year or 3 before anybody can afford them though.

And even longer until people can afford a drive to use them in.

[KM]

well, you'd think it looks like advanced expensive techology that will take ages and be expensive... but didn't people say the same about CD's? and then again about DVD's? and especially a DVDRW drive, no way you'd get them for less than £500 before 2010...

[Rat]

well, you'd think it looks like advanced expensive techology that will take ages and be expensive... but didn't people say the same about CD's? and then again about DVD's? and especially a DVDRW drive, no way you'd get them for less than £500 before 2010...

Yeah they did. They also said it about those huge (20") optical video discs (pre-CD) and they were right about that one. They also said nobody would want to spend money on mini-disc cos they already had CD players. They were largely right about that too. Folks aren't always wrong. They may or may not be wrong this time. We'll just have to wait and see.

Holography uses multiple lasers in different orientations. That means that this gadget is going to be rather different to existing optical storage devices. I imagine these devices are going to be pretty bulky initially so they'll have to be shrunk down some before production models can be made cheaply and before they'll become attractive to PC owners who want something they can stick in a spare drive bay in the front of their box.

As for the rate at which prices fall, well, I still can't afford to spare the money needed for a DVD burner. When one of my existing optical drives packs up, I'll consider it.

[KM]

its a major leap in the portable storage - the ammount of data it can hold is major

but i dont think its required yet, so the prices wont fall until people we start getting software that takes multiple DVD's (some programs are so bloated we aren't far from that now!)

the main problem i see with this is that it wont really work as a portable storage thing for moving files around if its bigger than the Hard Drive! We need to expand the hard drive capacity so most systems have 100TB or so of space before we start needing portable storage in the 300GB+ range

perhaps they will impliment this technology as fixed drives to start with then move to portable later?

[quicksilver]

I remember the same point about this that I am always making to friends,
great space, nice drives, but the life expectancy of the disks is extremely poor.
Last time I mentioned this subject on a forum folks fled, none of the manufacturers seem to give a straight answer to this important question
and it worries me that the storage is not clearly marked as a short term medium.
Recordable cd,s are already a nightmare due to poor quality dyes being used in the production plants.