First Holographic Drives and Media to Ship in 2006

I believe that this will fall into the ‘like to have’ rather than ‘need’ category for most folks. Regardless, there is something ultimately cool about being able to use Holographic Drives and Media.

A story on Physorg.com is reporting that InPhase Technologies, a company focused on holographic storage, has produced a medium capable of holding 515Gb of data per square inch which overshadows the capacity of the highest density magnetic platters currently in production. InPhase was a big hit at this year’s CES when they demonstrated its holographic storage prototypes and showed off the various media options but said that initial products will only use the red laser, as opposed to blue and green, for reasons of cost.

Holographic storage has been a topic of strong conversation in the storage community for a few years now since the need for alternative recording methods has become more apparent. Magnetic recording methods are approaching their physical limits because of the superparamagnetism phenomenon. Superparamagnetism occurs when the magnetic bits of data on magnetic media, such as hard disk drives, are placed so close together that they disrupt each others’ “on/off” state, corrupting the data and making the media unreadable. Source: DailyTech

[tags]holographic drives,hard disk drives,physorg.com,magnetic recording methods[/tags]