Holographic Storage On Track For December Ship Date

[thunderhawk]

Holographic Storage On Track For December Ship Date

The first holographic storage media will begin shipping by Christmas, executives at media maker Hitachi Maxell have indicated.

In an interview, Rich D'Ambrise, director of technical marketing at Maxell, said that 300-Gbyte holographic disks will begin shipping either in November or December, as InPhase Technologies, the developer of the holographic technology, said last year (http://www.extremetech.com/article2/...785630,00.asp).

However, D'Ambrise also indicated that the company will move to a second-generation, 800-Gbyte disc in 2008, and has targeted a 1.6-Tbyte removable cartridge by 2010.

Holographic storage uses a patented two-chemistry Tapestry photopolymer write-once material. The recording material is 1.5 mm thick and is sandwiched between two 130 mm diameter transmissive plastic substrates. Last year, InPhase indicated that the first incarnation of the InPhase technology would be used for archival purposes, and D'Ambrise indicated that that will still be the case: media will be roughly $120 to $180 apiece, and drives will cost about $15,000.

"We're happy so far that we haven't hit any obstacles with the drive or the media, and that we're on schedule to deliver to the market," D'Ambrise said.

Two alpha sites have deployed the technology, at Pappas Broadcasting in Reno, and at entertainment giant Turner Broadcasting, he said.

While the company is focusing on the lucrative enterprise storage market, Hitachi Maxell is also exploring more conventional storage options. The storage capacity of the technology is governed by the spot size of the laser, and a 100-Gbyte or 75-Gbyte consumer version could theoretically be created in the size of a postage stamp, D'Ambrise said.

"We're absolutely looking a prototypes of credit-card media [sizes]," D'Ambrise said.

D'Ambrise also confirmed that Maxell is developing a stacked volumetric optical disc (SVOD), essentially a jukebox-in-a-cartridge of ten stacked 9.4-GByte DVDs, for a total of 940 Gbytes. Each disc is 92 micrometers thick, about one-thirteenth the thickness of a DVD, he said.

Source: http://www.extremetech.com/article2/...1997498,00.asp

That's pretty fast, if you consider how long the BDA did over it to roll BD out...