The move towards a viable, commercial holographic storage medium creeps closer. It is believed that this will someday (possibly as early as within the next 2-3 years) begin replacing current optical drives as a vastly superior storage medium. Holographic storage allows “…1 million bits of data to be written or read in a single flash of light.” and then further: Unlike other technologies that record one data bit at a time, holography allows a million bits of data to be written and read in parallel with a single flash of light. This enables transfer rates significantly higher than current optical storage devices.

Imagine the possibilities of being able to carry around your entire music or movie collection on a credit card and insert into a device with no moving parts. I guess I should stop buying DVDs because they will be replaced by this technology someday … my hope is there will be some way to transfer them without having to repurchase. But then Hollywood will probably come out with better, higher-quality holographic storage versions.

There isn’t a commercial application of holographic storage yet, but by various accounts (just Google “holygraphic storage”) it’s coming sooner rather than later.

From rockwell:

Theoretical projections suggest that it will eventually be possible to use holographic techniques to store trillions of bytes an amount of information corresponding to the contents of millions of books in a piece of crystalline material the size of a sugar cube or a standard CD platter. Moreover, holographic technologies permit retrieval of stored data at speeds not possible with magnetic methods. In short, no other storage technology under development can match holography’s capacity and speed potential.

Did this post make you go hmm?

 Loading ...

• Holographic storage vs. DVD in 2006
• After holographic comes protein-based storage?
• Holographic storage one step closer to replacing DVD
• New DVD format can store up to 1 Terabyte
• 25 GB paper DVD
• Flash Studio MX 2004: no offsite XML calls directly from Flash?