Holographic storage made headlines yesterday for the first time in months. This time it’s The Register that brings us the news that General Electric has plans for a holographic storage product.
While this type of storage has promised incredible gains in density for years, actual shipping products are hard to find. InPhase has its 300 GB Tapestry drives on the roadmap for release later this year; but with Blu-Ray disks getting closer to that capacity and normal hard drives and tapes surpassing it easily, the technology has so far failed to deliver.
InPhase Tapestry media
General Electric seems convinced they can change this by offering improved holographic media that are readable with a (mostly) standard laser similar to the ones used in DVD and Blu-Ray drives. The storage density is high enough to store up to 500GB on a CD-sized medium; double that density is promised for the 2011/2012 timeframe.
I see just two small obstacles GE will have to overcome:
- A use case. I see most media consumption moving to online, instant delivery; so I doubt there’s a need for a new distribution for video or games to replace Blu-Ray. Tape drives are already available for long-term storage needs.
- A competitive price per gigabyte (or per terabyte; we’re in the 21st century, right?) The current figure mentioned is $0.10 per gigabyte; that’s higher than all alternatives I can think of (a pile of DVDs, hard drives, tape, basically anything that’s not flash memory).
To summarize, I highly doubt holographic memory is ready for prime time. With some further development it might become the backup medium of choice, replacing tape drives; but I don’t see that happening for the next couple of years.
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