Well the smart folks over at GE are getting closer to being able to use Holograms as a storage medium. While theoretical holographic storage has been around for quite some time the technical problems have keep it off the road map. The GE boys and girls however, have had a breakthrough.
The challenge has been to find materials and techniques so that small holograms would reflect enough light so that they could be read. The recent breakthrough is a 200-fold increase in the reflective power of the holograms, putting them in the low end of that needed by Blu-ray drives. The theoretical holodisks would be able to store about 500 gigabytes per disk.
It’s most likely going to be 5-10 thou before we see consumer level products for sale. It would be nice to be able to back my system to 4-5 disk. Right now even if I used Blu-ray disks it would take close to 50-60 disk to back up my whole system, so right not I only have offsite back up for criterial data.
Via C|Net.com
