Maxell Corporation of America, has said it will launch its first holographic storage products in September 2006. The first drive will have a capacity of 300GB and a throughput of 160Mbps.
Maxell says the technology designed by InPhase Technologies is capable of achieving 1.6TB per disk with a 120MBps bandwidth.
According to Maxell, Holographic data storage is superior to existing disc and hard drive technologies, and is also competitive against tape technologies in capacities and transfer rate. In addition, it offers a 50+ year media archive life and random data access. Finally, the media is expected to have the lowest cost per gigabyte of any commercial quality removable storage.
"Holographic media makes it possible for millions of pages of information and high definition images to be held on one small, relatively inexpensive disc," said Steven Pofcher, senior marketing manager at Maxell. "Imagine having a person's entire medical history, complete with MRI images, or storing a broadcast network's entire HD Library on a single disc. These are both possible with holographic technology, which has such large capacity that approximately a half million 300-page books can be stored on a single disc."
InPhase Technologies says that holography enables million bits of data to be written and read in parallel with a single flash of light - making transfer rates considerably higher than those of current optical storage devices.
Higher transfer rates, in turn translate into playback of broadcast-quality HDTV content; of which nearly 26 hours can be stored on a single 300GB disc writes TechTree
