Holographic storage products developed
Found on The Inquirer on Monday, 28 September 2009
Holographic technology has been developed that can pack 1TB onto a DVD-sized disk that can be read by a slightly modified Blu-ray drive and is expected to last 100 years.
The first products using the technology will be 1TB or multi-terabyte drives for archival storage and will hit the market in two to three years, said Peter Lorraine.
"We think there is consumer fatigue over changing formats. Blu-ray has two to four years of life to go. After that, consumers will be clamouring for terabytes of storage."
100 years again? I remember times like that from when the CD and DVD was introduced; and it has been proven that, if you're really lucky, the mediums will last 1/10th of that. Even if we trust marketing promises, the data will be pretty much useless in 100 years. How many of you can access files archived on Winchester drives? Or 8" floppy disks? And those mediums are only 36-38 years old. Even 3.5" floppy drives are getting rare these days and many still have those disks lying around somewhere. And IDE gets replaced by SATA. The only real way to archive for centuries is copying the data to new storage solutions every few years; and when you do, make sure you convert it to current formats. So don't blindy trust PR numbers without a little thinking about how pointless they really are.