Monday, March 27, 2006

What is holographic storage?

Imagine being able to hold 100 movies in the palm of your hand. Pretty amazing!

Holographic storage is a revolutionary departure from all existing recording methods because it takes advantage of volumetric efficiencies rather than only recording on the surface of the material. InPhase will deliver the industry’s first holographic drive and media later this year. 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.

Holography breaks through the density limits of conventional storage by going beyond recording only on the surface, to recording through the full depth of the medium. 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.

Combining high storage densities, fast transfer rates, with durable, reliable, low cost media, make holography poised to become a compelling choice for next-generation storage and content distribution needs.

In addition, the flexibility of the technology allows for the development of a wide variety of holographic storage products that range from handheld devices for consumers to storage products for the enterprise. Imagine 2GB of data on a postage stamp, 20 GB on a credit card, or 200 GB on a disk.

You can view a short video to see 3-D optical storage in action, and learn about the benefits.

You can visit the InPhase web site here

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