Holographic drive

Holographic drives are a form of data storage designed for computers, created by InPhase Technologies. For the last few decades they were confined to lab use, but are now becoming available in the public market. The smaller holographic drives can store thirty times the information of a Blu-Ray DVD.

Holographic drives store information in a manner different to normal DVD drives. While DVDs hold information on the surface or just below the surface, These drives pack data in a gel, using a pair of laser beams that cross through the entirety of the gel. A single pulse can etch one million bits, which is four times the write speed of Blu-Ray and HD DVD drives. The gel is durable enough to last for 50 years. Professional archiving disks created by Maxwell can hold 300 gigabytes of memory.

Consumer versions are expected to be released in two to three years, holding 1.6 terabytes of information, and the upper expectation is that holographic drives will be capable of holding 100 terabytes of information.

Technical Comparison
{| class="wikitable" |- ! Data Disk ! Capacity ! Writing Speed |- | Holographic Disk (2010 Release) | 1.6 TB | 960 Mbit/s. |- | Blu-Ray | 50 GB | 36 Mbit/s. |- | HD-DVD | 30 GB | 36 Mbit/s. |- | DVD | 8.5 GB | 27 Mbit/s. |- | CD | 0.7 GB | 7.9 Mbit/s. |}

[1] Article: Popular Science, April 2007