Holographic storage will be available next month!
300G on one disk

http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=313

Next month? I remember reading about this about a year and a half ago and they said it wouldn't be ready till 2010! I'm looking forward to see how this develops further. Right now its going to be expensive, very expensive.

Reminds me of fallout though

Looks very cool. It's going to be extremely expensive but if you give it a couple of years it will come down in price. It looks like a very promising product though.

It'll be very interesting to see how it turns out.

I'm not sure if I believe the lifespan. Fifty years sounds kinda overly optimistic, there may still be some kind of decay.

It should be a better lifespan than burnt CDs and DVDs. To me--this is just a small step closer to getting them mainstream. The idea of 300GB on a disc, while interesting, is actually not that good. To put it to you this way, many 750GB or 1TB hard drives use three or four magnetic platters, and the entire hard drive would fit in about the same area. Worse yet, mechanical hard drives have much better data density, as of now. Those platters used are anywhere from 250GB platters to 334GB platters. They're fast too--you can do all that fun activity at a sustainable 40+MBytes/s read and write speed. Simply put--this has a lot further to go to replace a mechanical hard drive now or a solid-state drive in the near future. I also somehow doubt that a new mechanical component will replace a current non-mechanical component. I realize that these holographic drives are not meant to replace hard drives, but right now experimental blu-ray discs (which will be available and more affordable then these holographic drives) can fit 100Gb on a quad-layer disc. The maximum density I've heard for a single blu-ray disc is 250GB--which is pretty dang close although experimental.

xbox 360 + somehow getting this thingy in it = beating the ps3 in every way.



Still, what could you possibly do with all of that storage? Fit 70 campaigns on one disk...










Of Crysis.



Bobby pants is mad at me. D;

Not happening. Did you even look at the article? Did you SEE how large the reader is?




Ask anyone who has a 320GB or larger hard drive. I have one myself--and it mostly holds games and backups of programs.










Oh ha ha ha. Very funny.

300gb in 1 drive. Cool that it's holographic and everything.. but I'd rather get a 1TB hard drive cheaper

It's 300GB on one disc. I'd rather get a 320GB single-platter hard drive.

That hard drive is most likely more expensive or less portable. You can't simply connect even an S-ATA harddrive in less than 5 minutes. You'll need to open op the computer, which can be a big task sometimes (*coughmaccough*), find an S-ATA cable, hope there's an available connector, connect it. Then there's the chance Windows doesn't like the drive. If it does, you'll need to format it and then when you want to use it in another computer, the drive is encrypted and unreadable.

No, I'll stick with optical disks.

It is possible to put a hard disk inside an enclosure and plug it in to a USB slot.. that probably takes 5 minutes.

But that's pretty expensive compared to optical disks.

$10 for an external enclosure and $75 for a hard drive... and permanent. It's more economical too--it's not just the price of discs to absorb. If this reader/burner plus the cost of media. While you may spend less on an individual piece of media, you still can buy 240 320GB hard drives or so for the price of this reader... that's about 71.5TB of storage for the price of one burner and a few 300GB discs.

For actual price/gigabyte and when you forget the price of the burner, it IS a lot cheaper to go with the holographic discs.

To be honest, everyone person has a different perfect portable storage medium. For me, USB Memory Sticks are perfect, not the cheapest, but they just plug in and go which is what I need out of them.

I'll believe it when I see it.

My favorite in function is USB flash drives as well. My favorite in (lack of) size is those SDHC memory cards. My favorite in pure reliability is mechanical hard drives.

Do you mean one terabyte? Wow! Didn't realize that much memory was available to the public!

This sounds interesting, although I'm way too stupid to understand most of what it's talking about. Gerr.