Holographic memory becomes a reality

Excerpts from the article:

"InPhase Technologies and Maxell will demonstrate the device, named Tapestry, at the National Association of Broadcasters Convention in Las Vegas later today.

The prototype is a 300GB drive that can store over 35 hours of broadcast-quality high-definition video on a single removable 12cm disk... It is also the child of the Tapestry family, with the company planning a range of holographic drives with capacities up to 1.6TB.

Holographic storage disks are particularly well suited to applications like broadcasting and video editing because of the fact that data is read and recorded in parallel, a million bits at a time. The prototype has a data transfer rate of 27Mbit/s.

This polytopic recording technique enables more holograms to be stored in the same volume of material by overlapping not only pages, but also books of data. This dramatically increases the storage density to around 200 gigabits per square inch, significantly higher than any other optical format."