Holographic Storage On Track For December Ship Date
 

The first holographic storage media will begin shipping by Christmas, executives at media maker Hitachi Maxell have indicated. Holographic storage uses a patented two-chemistry Tapestry photopolymer write-once material. The recording material is 1.5 mm thick and is sandwiched between two 130 mm diameter transmissive plastic substrates. Last year, InPhase indicated that the first incarnation of the InPhase technology would be used for archival purposes, and D'Ambrise indicated that that will still be the case: media will be roughly $120 to $180 apiece, and drives will cost about $15,000.

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Holographic memory is a technique that can store information at high density inside crystals or photopolymers. As current storage techniques such as DVD reach the upper limit of possible data density (due to the diffraction limited size of the writing beams), holographic storage has the potential to become the next generation of storage media. The advantage of this type of data storage is that the volume of the recording media is used instead of just the surface. This three-dimensional aspect allows for a phenomenon known as Bragg volume selectivity to be utilised, whereby many information laden holograms can be superimposed or multiplexed in the same volume of medium. It is necessary to Bragg detune each hologram recorded with respect to its neighbours. This can be achieved by a number of methods, e.g. rotation of the media with respect to the recording object and reference beams or changing the wavelength or phase of the recording laser beams for each hologram.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_storage