for several years, the next crest of storage has always been 3 dimensional holographic media. two companies seemed locked in the struggle to get their technology to market, inphase and optware. both promise a device by this year in the range of 200 GB to 300 GB, and a few deals have been made, but no hardware yet. when only the light moves, and the disc remains mostly steady, challenges can arise.
the first holographic storage system will most likely be over $10,000 and address only the most needy high volume broadcaster or studio. the consumer versions of such devices most like will not see the light of day until 2010. for the rest of us with 500 GB and 750 GB hard drives with archive in mind, we have the foolhardy disk to disk solution, or a very tall stack of DVD or blu-ray discs. more than likely for 2006 and 2007 we’ll still be using LTO2 of LTO3 tapes for the archive, holding either 200 GB or 400 GB per cartridge.