3D Analog, Part II

I talked about 3D analog here, in which a replacement for magnetic reading was replaced. I found a company that is actually working on this 3D optical storage. InPhase is working on this technology right now.

From their website: "InPhase Technologies was founded in December 2000 as a Lucent Technologies venture, spun out of Bell Labs research, with the objective of becoming the first company to bring holographic data storage technology to market. Through revolutionary techniques developed by a team of Bell Labs scientists, InPhase has solved several fundamental problems associated with holographic storage, including the creation of a viable storage medium, and the systems expertise required to record holograms. The result of more than ten years of groundbreaking research in holographic storage has culminated in the InPhase TapestryTM media and drive."

Implications? Ton Tarasoff, vice president of engineering at Turner Entertainment claims, “The holographic disk promises to retail for $100, and by 2010, it will have capacity of 1.6TB each... Even this first version can store 300GB per disk, and it has 160MB/sec. data throughput rates. That’s burning. Then combine it with random access, and it’s the best of all worlds.”

Because of it's nature, 3D analog can attain far higher density than standard magnetic disk drives, which store data only on the surface of a disk. This is done by storing data throughout the polymer material that makes up a disk. Holographic storage is well suited for broadcasting and video editing because the data is read and stored in parallel at a million bits at a time, and prototypes of the holographic disk arrays have a data transfer rate of 27MB/sec.

More at ComputerWorld.