You always see folks holding what looks like plastic cards in science fiction movies. The plastic cards are memory devices that hold gigantic amounts of data. They slip it into a console on the computer and bring up specs of entire spacecrafts and other such things. Well, InPhase technologies is moving us one step closer to making that a reality. They have come out with Tapestry. This is a holographic storage media device that can be encoded with a laser. It comes in ROM and recordable formats. What this means is that it is volumetric - it reads in the material, not just on its surface, like conventional hard disks. And they just recently announced that their newest product boasts 500 gb per square inch, as opposed to 313 gb for magnetic disk drives. And this sounds pretty good to me:
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“The first generation drive has a capacity of 300 gigabytes on a single disk with a 20 megabyte per second transfer rate. The first product will be followed by a family ranging from 800GB to 1.6 terabyte (TB) capacity.” Holographic storage is an intriguing solution because it can be expanded in a number of different ways: thickness of the material used, wavelength of the laser, and the number of bits/pixels in each page of data. Now, at first this may seem confusing but a simple analogy will help tremendously. Think of the holographic storage unit as a book. It can hold many “pages” of information that are stacked on each other. Now, the pitch of the material that is stored can be decreased as to allow for more book additions. It’s sort of like smashing books into an area and then being able to read them without opening them. Very soon, these disks could be utilized in homes, where they could store 106 DVD quality movies on each disk. Simply amazing.
[tag]InPhase technologies,holographic storage,tapestry holographic media[/tag]
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