These are fuckin pwn 300 GB disks - with 1 Terabyte disks in a couple years... Anybody know? Then i can truely go on a porn downloading spree.

Tomorrow's Storage Today: Holographic Drive to Debut in May

by Agen Schmitz on April 25, 2008

While it's been on the list of technologies that have been "right around the corner" for many years (joining hydrogen cars and jet packs to name just two), holographic data storage is about to make its debut in the marketplace in May. Holographic storage has been a bit of a Holy Grail as its method of writing data to disc as light patterns in three dimensions can store hundreds of gigabytes of data onto a disc the size of a standard DVD/CD. (In comparison, a Blu-ray disc can only hold 25 GB on a single layer.)
Robin Harris over at ZDNet's Storage Bits blog explains how this technology works and one of its most interesting features:

Holograms use 2 coherent laser beams - a reference beam and an illumination beam - to create an interference pattern that is recorded on photo sensitive media. Shine a laser on the recorded interference pattern and the original image is reconstructed in glorious 3D. As the laser moves around - or you do - you see the image from different perspectives.
[...]
Another factor: photographic media has the longest proven lifespan - over a century - of any modern media. Since there's no physical contact you can read the media millions of times with no degradation.

InPhase Technologies is set to release its first holographic-based storage device in May, dubbed the Tapestry, and it touts a disc capacity of 300 GB with up to 50 years of archive life--which certainly kicks butt over the usual 2 to 3 years I've been getting from my hard drives. And Richard Grigonis over at TMCnet adds:

The Tapestry can handle a 20 MBps-120 MBps transfer rate and can access data in milliseconds. It's less expensive than any magnetic hard drive RAID solution. The device supports four levels of error correction, so you won't be losing any data unless you nuke the device or throw it into an active volcano.

However, as per usual, there's a price to pay for early adoption, and this one's a doozy: $18,000 for the Tapestry drive and $180 for the 300 GB discs. Suffice it to say, my wife can breathe a sigh of relief to know that this won't be coming home with me any time soon. But it's definitely an exciting step into the future (if you're one, like me, who gets excited over data storage).

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/05/inphase_layoffs/

I think it's dead in the water man.

Our source said the environment of InPhase is unfortunate because the science behind holographic storage is sound — if given enough time and money.

"There are still issues that need to be resolved, but they are solvable."

damn inphase got self-owned

This is still an awesome idea but maybe you need a company thats not gonna make promises their engineers can't keep.