Holographic Storage By 2004?

Several companies are getting funding and anticipate that holographic storage will become a commercial reality within 2 years. Companies working on them include Polight Technologies, InPhase Technologies, and Optware of Japan.

The first uses of this technology will be archival storage, since the disks will be write once/read many. But as digital collections continue to swell, these new holo-disks will make it a snap to back up everything onto one disk. Starting capacities are expected to be between 100GB and 1 Terabyte, and without fundamentally new technology, could be ramped up to 10 Terabytes within a few years. A 10 terabyte disk you could store the equivalent of 50 million high resolution photographs, 10 million books (almost every book published in the last 100 years), 160,000 hours of music (that would include nearly all published music of the 20th century) and 5000 hours of hi-resolution video, which is equivalent to 2500 movies. Imagine all the music or all the books in written form ever publsihed in the last 100 years on a single CD-sized disk. 10 Terabytes would also be sufficient to archive the entire first 8 years (1993-2001) of the World Wide Web not counting online databases.