By now if you haven’t heard of the new storage medium that is going to blow away Blu-Ray and HD DVD, we’ll go over a refresher here. It’s called Holographic-memory discs and they were developed by a firm in Colorado called InPhase Technologies. The discs are about the size of a DVD and can hold 60 times the data that’s about 300 gigabytes of storage space. As an added bonus the new technology can read and write up to ten times faster than DVD. A single flash of light from the new technology is capable both read and write operations simultaneously. The parallel process of read/write is a breakthrough in speed that not even the upcoming HD DVD and Blu-Ray can match.
InPhase adds that their Tapestry Holographic Memory technology can be implemented with improvements so that future discs of the same size can be used to store up to 1.6 terabytes of data. The transfer rates of these could reach 120 Megs per second, that’s about 340 times the capacity of a DVD and 20 times faster. This is truly the future of digital storage. Way back in 1997 renowned physicist Michio Kaku postulated on the future use of lasers and holographic storage in his book Visions: How Science Will Revolutionize the 21st Century. It’s interesting to see this developed in practice by 2005.
So, you might be thinking exactly what I was think every time I hear of some new super-wonder technology coming down the pipes. Who cares? The pending format war between Blu-Ray and HD DVD have made speculation on the future of optical storage tentative at best. News of super-wonder technology makes interesting reading whilst clearing one’s bowels upon porcelain furniture and Michio Kaku’s wonderful speculative visions of the future fit the bill quite nicely. But what does that have to do with us today in 2005? We all know the CIA already has holographic memory beams that can fire Da-Vinci lasers at your brain to read your thoughts; who cares? You’re not going to see that really cool stuff the military has under wraps contracted out to Samsung anytime soon.
Well, this is the interesting part. It seems that this isn’t just a mere ponderance of some future gee-wizary. This is being marketed today by Hitachi, a very real and very un-secret conspiracy, but a publicly traded company that wants you to buy the new technology as early as next year.
Hitachi is ramping up to join in on the format war against Toshiba’s HD DVD and Sony’s Blu-Ray with a technology that is so far beyond any Toshiba and Sony are working with it simply cannot be ignored. They’ll call it Tapestry Holographic Disc but it’s also called the Holographic Versatile Disc (HVD) so they have a few naming conventions to iron out, it should be pretty cool. Let that be a lesson to Sony and their proprietaryitis.