Holographic storage is making another comeback

The American General Electric plans to breathe new life into holographic storage media. GE believes its solution has a chance of success thanks to DVD and Blu-ray compatibility. However, prices have yet to fall.

The first generation of holographic discs to which General Electric works, should have a capacity of 500GB and store data in micro-holograms. The holographic images are written by two lasers in different layers of the disc. A single laser would be enough to read the data again, and GE plans to use that same laser to read data from CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray discs as well. This would allow the company to market an innovative storage medium that is backwards compatible with the current range of optical drives.

However, according to GE, it is not realistic to expect the holographic drives in stores before 2014 or 2015: before that, the company also expects to be able to expand the storage capacity per disk to more than 1TB. The data on the holographic disks can be accessed with an access time of 3ms and the burning speed would be over 100MB/s. Burning a disc would then take more than two and a half hours, but in the factory this could be done considerably faster.

The production of the hardware and the disks will be outsourced by GE: the production licenses will be announced shortly, it is expected. At ten cents per gigabyte, a terabyte disk would cost $100: to seriously compete with established backup media like tape, that price has to drop drastically.