Monday, June 7, 2010

1 Petabyte Holographic Storage Coming Soon?

1 Petabyte Holographic Storage Disc
Just a few years ago InPhase announced its revolutionary 300GB holographic disc which was supposed to change the way we store data in high volumes. Shortly afterwards Call/Recall announced their plans to develop a 1TB optical drive and disk with backwards compatibility with Blu-ray. Fast forward a few years to today and holographic imaging still hasn't caught on. Yet there is another holographic hopeful taking a shot at the ultra high-capacity optical disc market by the name of Storex Technologies and their Hyper CD technology. This time however its not a terabyte they are aiming for, but instead a whopping amount of 1,000,000 GB.

"The company holds patents on glass and glass-ceramics compositions as well as read/write mechanics and optics concept(s) applicable to high-density data storage. Using commercially available low power lasers and optics, capacities of more than 1,000,000 GB (1 PB) can be achieved using a CD size disk of 120mm in diameter and 1.2mm thick."

Storex Technologies was founded by Romanian scientist Eugen Pavel in 2007 and is, in effect, nothing more than a technology demonstration group looking for a partner to invest in their intellectual property. Pavel is known as a reputable scientist and has been conducting research in the fields of fluorescent photosensitive glasses and glass-ceramics for many years.

The idea is based on glass-ceramic discs and laser diodes to record information inside the virtual layers of a CD-sized fluorescent photosensitive glass via 40nm-wide lasers. The layers are said to be 700nm apart - but we don't know how many layers per disc - and data access is said to occur at DVD-like speed. Storex claims a 5,000 year life for the disks, but this is merely a theoretical estimate since there is no physical product available for testing. The technology is still in the earliest stages of development and it may be a long wait before we see the concept in action.

With so many failed attempts to bring holographic disk drives to the market, we sincerely hope this concept doesn't fade into oblivion like the rest.

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