Web Dev Ireland

I remember doing research for an assignment in college back in 1999 and I stumbled across a research company called Cambridge Technology and they were looking into holographic storage using lasers to put information onto an optical cube.
The idea as I understood it was if you had lasers(two or more) put information into a 3d shape they could store huge amounts of info in the tiny cube because they were working in three dimensions you had a huge amount of space to put the information i.e you not only had a flat surface to put your data on you also had the depth of the cube to put data into.
The researchers very optimistic about the technology because it would give speed comparable to RAM but it would be non-volatile (i.e. if you turn the power off the data is not lost) and have massive storage capacity. I thought this was amazing and so “futuristic”, well it turns out the future is here people!

The Register has an article today on holograpic disks with Maxell already announcing a 300gb holographic storage system to be launched next year. This is only the start of the holograpic disk, with disks upto 1.6Tb!!!(yes thats Terra-bytes) envisioned by Maxell. Data transfer will start at 20Mbs and rise to 120Mbs (thats plenty to play even the most hi-def films).

Other companys, such as toshiba have put their money into a format with the catchy name HVD - Holographic Versatile Disc. This will be a standard DVD/CD sized disk with staggering specs (1Tb storage with 1GBs throughput) .

I’m glad to see this technology finally come to fruition.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 25th, 2005 at 10:53 am and is filed under Technical, Gadgets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.