Turner Entertainment testing holographic discs for storage

This is an
interesting article over at ComputerWorld this morning. It seems they have learned that Turner Entertainment is busy focusing on the potential of holographic storage. The intent of which, is to move away from hard discs and tape for archival purposes. In fact, they have already completed initial testing and are now pressing on with the concept.

The holographic disk promises to retail for $100, and by 2010, it will have capacity of 1.6TB each. That's pretty inexpensive," said Ron Tarasoff, vice president of broadcast technology and engineering at Turner Entertainment. 'Even this first version can store 300GB per disk, and it has 160MB/sec. data throughput rates. That's burning. Then combine it with random access, and it's the best of all worlds." Holographic disk storage can attain far higher density than standard magnetic disk drives, which store data only on the surface of a disk, because the holographic technology allows data to be stored throughout the polymer material that makes up a disk. Analysts said holographic storage is well suited for broadcasting and video editing because the data is read and stored in parallel at a million bits at a time, and prototypes of the holographic disk arrays have a data transfer rate of 27MB/sec.

Turner Entertainment has already tested a prototype holographic disk array called Tapestry, manufactured by InPhase Technologies Inc. InPhase hopes to ship production models in 2006. Another goal has been set to break the 1TB capacity mark for these disks by 2008. Check out the ComputerWorld story here. The InPhase website is quite interesting to visit as well!

Source: ComputerWorld