Maxell to provide holographic discs by end of next year

Siswell used our news submit to tell us about this welcome news over at The Register. The report states that Maxell
and InPhase are prepared to hit the market with a holographic storage system by
"late 2006". The initial offering will probably be discs with an impressive
300 gigabyte storage capability with the ability to handle data transfers at a
rate of 20MBps. If you think this is attractive, then please read on.

However, the company said the technology, designed by InPhase Technologies, is capable of achieving 1.6TB per disk - and that's uncompressed capacity - with a 120MBps bandwidth. InPhase was founded in December 2000 by Lucent, and has been working on holographic storage- in which data is encoded as a 3D pattern written and read by laser beam - ever since. In addition to the colossal storage capacity, InPhase promises a data archive life of over 50 years, not much different to the longevity claimed by most optical media makers - a CD-RW for instance will typically retain data for 20-100 years, depending on which manufacturer you speak to.

We have an annoying battle going
on with the new higher capacity optical storage Blu-ray, but that focus is
really centered on home entertainment, as we can deduce from all the
lobbying and catering to Hollywood. Unfortunately as well, the draconian DRM
schemes that have been put forth to protect these interests, have even Microsoft
saying, this is simply unfriendly to consumers and not going to work well
on a PC. At times like these, maybe some folks will just skip over one
generation and embrace another completely different strategy. The capacity is
certainly there to do the enticing.

Maxell and InPhase may be the clever ones, as this system
is a dream for data storage and would be a highly desired system for anyone that
wants to archive a lot of data. With the promise of a 50 year shelf life, this
seems to be their tack. However, here is what Siswell is wondering: "Some more hype
from a respectable brand? Just wondering what DRM will tagged on these when they
come out . . ."

I say, why not leave Hollywood out of this one?

Source: The Register