By Evan Ackerman
Released this week (in commercial form, anyway) was the InPhase holographic storage drive, which we had a look at back in November of 2005. A promising and undeniably futuristic technology, the current form of this $18,000 drive (for which “in the palm of your hand” may be somewhat of a misnomer) can store up to 300GB of data on $180 holographic disks. In terms of cost per GB, that’s not that great, especially considering that the disks themselves only transfer data at 20 MB/s, which is something like 7x slower than conventional SATA drives. Disks of 1.6TB are promised by 2010, but my guess is that by 2010, 1.6TB won’t seem like as quite as much as it does here in 2007. Sigh.
The reality is that both holographic storage and quantum computers (despite advertisements to the contrary) are effectively proof of concept technologies, designed primarily to raise interest and capital for future refinements. And that’s fine, it makes sense… But I’ll still confess to being a little bit disappointed at their premieres.
[ InPhase Holographic Storage ] VIA [ CrunchGear ]
