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.
Overview :
About one year ago, InPhase announced a storage density of 200 Gbit/in2, which is about 50% more than the density of current 2.5" perpendicular hard drives. Today, the company announced that it has more than doubled the maximum density to 515 Gbit/in2. Data was recorded with a 407 nm blue laser in 1.5 mm holographic Tapestry media. In last year's demonstration, the company said it was able to record 1 million bits per page on a total of 252 pages per book. This year, InPhase hit 1.3 million bits per data page and 320 data pages per book (a collection of data pages is generally referred to as "book".)
According to the company, the recording architecture enables more holograms to be stored in the same volume of material by overlapping not only pages, but also books. Three tracks of overlapping books were written with a track pitch of 700 microns, InPhase said.
How Holographic Media Works :
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.
To buy some time, a new method of magnetic recording has been introduced in the last few years which is known as perpendicular magnetic recording, or PMR. Using PMR heads, bits are written perpendicular to the hard disk platter rather than laying them down parallel or horizontally. This method ultimately conserves surface area and effectively increases the storage density without the occurrence of superparamagnetism. However, there is a limit to this method as well.
This is where holographic storage comes in with the ability to store more than a terabyte of data on a single piece of media. Holographic media can be manufactured in various shapes, sizes, and thickness.
End User :
With high definition audio and video around the corner, the capacity of Blu-ray and HD-DVD media isn't quite as stunning as the specifications may suggest. 50 GB Blu-ray disks - which can store about two HD movies - is simply just good enough, especially if we consider the fact that these disks aren't available yet.
Organizations that need to store enormous amounts of data are likely to look elsewhere: While tape drives are likely remain the dominant solution for backing up data, holographic drives could soon become an option when data not only needs to be stored, but also instantly accessed.
InPhase mentioned that such a disk, which measures 5.25" in diameter, could hold 106 DVD movies. Assuming that InPhase hinted to a DVD movie size of 4.7 GB, the capacity of the demonstrated disk would be about 500 GB.
Launch :
The first product will most likely be a 300GB disk with a transfer rate of 20MB/sec however the second wave of holographic media will range from 800GB to 1.6TB capacities. Currently, to achieve 1.6TB of capacity we would need 4x400GB hard disk drives in a RAID 0 array which does not come cheap.
There has been no recent information on the price of the holographic disk drive generation. In April of 2005, the company told us that the drives will be priced initially around $10,000. Media will cost around $100, we were told.