* InPhase claims industry’s first holographic disk drive
InPhase Technologies is planning to ship a new technology this summer and it’s a doozy.
The company, a Bell Labs spinoff, will ship the industry’s first holographic disk drive and media. InPhase uses a technology called polytopic recording, which records through the depth of the media in three directions and reads 1 billion bits of data with each flash of light. (Read more about holographic storage technology here.)
Recording a holographic image requires splitting a laser beam in two. One beam, the signal beam carries the data; the other beam, the reference beam positions where the data is written. Data is arranged on the media – in this case a 300GB disk – in a checkerboard pattern consisting of light and dark pixels. Each pixel is formed by the intersection of the signal and reference beam. A 300GB disk could hold the equivalent of 64 DVDs.
InPhase’s holographic technology has its supporters and skeptics. Some say the technology is long overdue – InPhase first promised to ship it last fall – and some observers doubt the persistence of the media. InPhase claims that its disk has a shelf-life of at least 50 years.
Others say that a 300GB holographic disk could be a boon to the archiving and media business, many of whom have petabytes of data to store. The first version of the disk is write-once only; InPhase expects it will have a re-writeable version in 2008.
InPhase’s drive will cost $18,000; its media will sell for $180 a disk. By 2010, the company expects to increase the capacity of the disk to 1.6TB.
Storage in the news:
* In the category of Buy More Storage, watch this funny Sun video on YouTube that talks about humungabytes and ginormabytes.
* Sun held its annual Analyst Summit earlier this month. If you are interested, you can view the presentations and watch the video keynotes here.
* EMC last week unveiled its Geographically Dispersed Disaster Restart, mainframe disaster recovery software for the Symmetrix DMX-3 storage array.
