InPhase touts 'record breaking' holo storage
density
By Tony Smith
27th March 2006 08:47 GMT
Holographic storage specialist InPhase last week said it had
managed to squeeze more than 515 billion bits of information into a
square inch of storage media - higher than any commercially
available data-archive technology, the company claimed.
InPhase said its latest drive and media - branded Tapestry -
together provide a data transfer rate of 23MBps - up from
the 20MBps announced in November 2005 when Maxell said it
would be commercialising InPhase's system, in late 2006. InPhase
last week said it was still on track to deliver drives and media to
market "later this year".
InPhase re-iterated that the first generation of Tapestry products
on the market will offer 300GB of unformatted storage per
disk, but it expects to get the capacity up to 800GB and on to
1.6TB. Even the lowest capacity makes
next-generation optical disc format's Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD, with
their respective dual-layer capacities of, respectively, 50GB and
30GB, pale by comparison. That said, they'll surely be a
far cheaper in the near term.
InPhase was founded in December 2000 by Lucent, and has been
working on holographic storage - in which data is encoded as a 3D
pattern written and read by laser beam - ever since. It isn't the
only company promoting holographic storage. Japan's Optware - which
is backed by Toshiba, Intel and others - is working on a DVD-sized
holographic disc is says will hold more than 1TB of data with a
throughput of 1Gbps.
Optware's format is dubbed HVD (Holographic Versatile Disc) and the
company is already pushing a 200GB HVD-RW disc type through the HVD
Alliance, an organisation supported by Optware, Fuji Photo and
half-a-dozen or so Japanese chemicals companies. ®
