News

posted on 23 April 2008 06:29

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Holographic storage developer InPhase Technologies has said it will announce its Tapestry hologram storage product in May. A version of the product was demonstrated at the NAB2008 show in Las Vegas earlier this monh.

The bare facts are these: Tapestry consists of 120mm (5.25-inch) diameter clear plastic disks in a cartridge case. Holographic images are stored in the depth of the recording medium on the disk's surface using a blue ray laser, similar to the Blu-ray laser. The disks are claimed to have 300GB capacity and a 50-year life. They are burned and read in a Tapestry drive which appears to be priced at $18,000.

The disks will cost $180 each in volume. The I/O rate is 20MB/sec.

It has taken 8 years for InPhase to develop its products with virtually all the functions of the technology having to be especially developed. In this respect InPhase has similarities with Plasmon which has also developed its blue laser-based UDO optical disks on its own.

The Tapestry market is the professional media archive, the one used to store archive copies of films. They could store the actual film stock in canisters. They could use tape in a library. They could use Blu-ray optical discs or they could use Plasmon's UDO.

A quick set of comparisons and contrasts looks like this:-

LTO3 is four times faster than Tapestry and holds 100GB more but tape is not guaranteed to hold data for 50 years and needs its contents re-writing to fresh media every so often, it not being an archive-and-forget medium. It is also not a random access medium, somewhat negating its faster I/O.

Blu-ray optical disks hold 25GB or 50GB and so have an immediate capacity disadvantage. They are of course cheaper but they are not promoted as having a 50-year life. That may change.

Plasmon's UDO has a capacity disadvantage, holding 60GB in its generation 2 version with UDO-3 set at 120GB and UDO-4 at 240GB on the roadmap. It does have a 50-year life but UDO-2 has a slower 12MB/sec I/O rate. UDO is also in use and not a version 1 product.

It would seem that InPhase will have the high-capacity, 50-year archive store market pretty much to itself for a few years.

^{[Paul Roberts, news editor.]}