I believe that should be 10 cents a Gigabyte not 10 cents a disk.

Honestly, even at 10 cents a gig, that's not a horrendous deal...

I'm suddenly reminded of the Jukeboxes with near a hundred CDs in them, suddenly filled with 500GB Holographic storage discs (H-discs; holodiscs; HDs?) switching out on the fly as 20GB ram maintain the operating system.

Awesome. I first heard about this back in the 90's. I read the full artice in the NY times though today. However, they quoted the price a little differently. It will cost 10 cents per GB, not per disk. So at 500GB per disk that would be about $50 bucks.

This will be awesome. I first heard about this in the 90's. I read the full article in the NY times today. However, they quoted the price a little differently. They said it would cost 10 cents per GB, not per disk. So that would be $50 bucks for a 500GB disk. Still not bad at all!

Figures...my computer crashed, had to re type the post - only to find out the original went through. *echo echo* God I love technology.

This is the same crap that was reported back in Feb 2006...

Hmmm, at $50 for the GE 1/2 terabyte holodisk, or $90 for a hard drive with a full terabyte, this is going to be a hard sell.

I don't think it will be that hard of a sell...particularly for businesses who still back up their data on data cassettes. Also, for those who want to back up their collection of dvd's/cd/s etc. I myself have almost 800 audio discs, If I can fit all those onto one cd, then I won't need 2-400 disc changers for my collection (I like the shuffle features...I don't often listen to one disc all the way through).

Also, imagine the possibilities for movies. Particularly should the studios pick up this technology vs blue ray. Imagine, going forward, how many lines of resolution can be coded into it.

$50.00 per half a terabyte, not bad. What about the drive to read this new disc?

Actually the technology was first developed by InPhase Technologies Group Inc. They were the first to develop the Holographic storage capabilities a few years ago. So it looks like your facts are a day late and a dollar short. The only difference between now and a few years ago is that the technology has come down in price.

TEC: You have no data to back up your condescending statement. This technology is still in the developmental stages, and thus HAS no price yet as it is NOT YET AVAILABLE. Your "few years ago" is nonsense. DO YOU SEE HOLOGRAM STORAGE BEING USED? UH, NO. Do the world a favor--next time you have a thought..write it down, wipe your ass with it, and then scarf it down. It'll do the world more good that way.

why are we still stuffing energy into the old fashioned rotating disc medium?

this uses far more energy and is more bulky then compact flash.

if we do want to use holography for digital storage make it :

- smaller then a cd
- make it so that we don't put energy into spinning the medium which is wasting energy and makes the machine unnecessarily bulky, and spinning parts = failures.

however i do see a future for a holograpic stationary plate that can be read by a laser.

the question is, can you make it small enough?

if so it would be good to make "microdot holograpic plates" that can be read by a laser (if its a bigger laser would just be fancy, making something unperceptable and unreadable by eye makes it a good investment to waste laser light )

we could use these "holo dot" in use as security like if you bought a product instead of giving the id code you would scan the "holo dot"

see it as a barcode or quikmark sort of thing, only holding much more info.

we could see it in passports and drivers licenses, etc.

then when we can cram more info on it we might use "holo dots" to encode private data like music and or video files etc.

but if the light is not gained by chemical processes then a "laer machine" will always use more energy then just a comperatively simple flash drive.

thus making holography obsolete

Hey Buddy Love before you critisize me why dont you take your fat head out of your ass for a minute and look up InPhase for yourself before you tell me i dont know what im talking about. I was looking into this a few years ago and by a few years ago i mean 2003. Here is Wikipedia's page on InPhase:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InPhase
and if that isnt enough here is their website smart ass:
http://www.inphase-technologies.com/
The technology that InPhase has been developing is called "Tapestry Media"(A holographic disc almost exactly the same as the one GE is releasing, Only 150% more storage capacity) They have already accomplished the Holographic disc, They are just trying to up the size.
So anything else you want to add Buddy, I would love to here what super smart witty comment you have for me next.

Do some research you Douche.

Buddy just got schooled. Nice work TeC I hate trolls.

Any optical format is dead. I would have been much happier if they were developing a 3.5 inch format though (5.25 is so 80s and takes up a lot of room in my PC). By the end of this year Flash cards will be 128GBs at 1/10 the size. Not to mention you can write to flash over and over, it just makes no sense to go optical. The only thing keeping this archaic tech alive is the recording and music industries hoping to thrive off the ignorance of the consumer.
I'm sure some of you will throw the price difference out there but by the end of next year a 128GB stick will be 1/4 of the cost, 256-512GB versions will exist, and they will be giving 64GB away for free.
If you’re lucky you might start seeing writable versions of this holographic media on a $500 player by then. No thanks, mechanical drives have already dug their ditch, they just need to lay in them now.

I suspect they're maintaining the CD/DVD format simply because of momentum. Society sees a DVD on a shelf, they instantly know what it is. No education required. So if someone releases a new kind of disc that holds more information, all you need is a fancy packaging and marketing campaign, and everyone will know what it is the moment they see it.

Also, there's the fact that while building all-new technology may return the best results for this media (like something similar to an SD card the size of a credit card) the second fact is that if you can make it work with existing technology, the corporations who make these things won't have to retool as much of other factory space to handle the new format. And that saves money. While any given person reading this might not care if the companies make even more money, consider that if they can find ways to save money, they may jump on the bandwagon sooner. As a rule, if you can find a way for them to make money, you can play to their greed.

Finally, there's the storage medium itself. I don't know if the device shown up above is read/write or just one-way. It doesn't say. If it's write-only, that will limit initial sales... but only to a point. It will still sell well to anyone who'd burn a one-shot CD, and for the same reasons. It's when they make it reusable that they increase the market. Especially if they can deal with the diminishing returns problem with writeable DVD's. (For those who don't know, a rewritable DVD isn't wiped clean when you reuse it. Each sector on the disk has a lot of room, and the whole recording medium "moves over" a little on the track, telling the main index track where everything is, not just on the disk, but in the individual sectors. So the more you rewrite, the less you have as you start running out of space. The ability to truly *erase* the previous imprint would be invaluable.)

Even if they can't deal with the rewrite issue yet, a 500GB storage medium that can fit in a CD caddy will be of immense value for data backups and any high-volume data transfers. There's a market for it already. And the CD medium just means the average, uneducated public (which outnumbers all of us, lest we forget) will instantly recognize it when they see it.

This is good news. The technology is finally being developed commercially. As others above have stated, this sort of technology was brought up in the 90's. In the article that I read at the time, the data was to be stored in holographic cubes, rather than spinning discs. The advantage to the former was the benefit of no moving parts, and that the images could be re-written over many times to allow the introduction of new data. A secondary advantage to no moving parts was a vast increase in transfer speeds of 1GB/sec. That doesn't sound like now, but 13 years ago where 1.3 GB HDD were cool and DSL had only just come out, 1GB/sec was blast-tastic fast!

I sure hope this technology picks up, and why not? As the internet develops where more and more television, movies, and the like are streamed into computers, they will need to store all those things somewhere, and when physical space becomes an issue when you're looking at server farms, any bit of storage capacity/volume has to be worthwhile!

Your post proved nothing. And I'm not a troll, I'm a regular reader and commenter of this site. I don't pay attention to what every douchebag says, but your idiocy stuck out, as it does now. I repeat, the technology does not exist, and thus you were and are incorrect. That's all there is to it. Give it up before your nerd rage gives you your second heart attack.

Of COURSE the company is going to lie and play up its own product! You're so easily manipulated. You don't even know that you don't capitalize words in the middle of a sentence unless they're proper nouns, you "Douche." *snicker*
If you love this InFase so much why don't you go work for their fake technology instead of bashing GE's amazing breakthrough? Leave us sane people to our discussions, please.

You got to love this.

Your precious company taken STRAIGHT FROM WIKIPEDIA: However, the product was not released by this target date, marking the third time the company failed to release the reader on-time after previously setting release dates of late 2006, and then February 2007. As a result of these delays, InPhase was forced to cut a number of its workforce; currently there is no release date for the drive visible. (Because they're lying, like you are.) I'm done with you now.

That's wonderful. All my music and movies and tv shows collections in just one disc each.

LOL - I think I'm liking the Buddy Love/TEC commentary more than the holographic disc story!
I'm with Buddy though. If a company cannot put a product out for nearly 3 years and you're relying on WIKIPEDIA as your go to information guide...then your facts might as well be in Us Weekly (tabloid for those of you that don't shop at Wal-mart)
Personally, I hate CDs, DVDs, Blueray and any other form of easily scratched and or damaged disc format. And I don't care how much it will hold. Just means more people will be putting 128MB onto a disc that can hold 500GB just to put on airs that they are cool and hip with technology (true story except with a 4gb DVD)
Just how long would it take to burn 500GB of data to a disk anyway? Too freakin' long that's how!

Chiller, just think...all your music, movies and tv show collections on one disc... then it gets a scratch and all that is hosed. You have to baby discs too much for them to be of any good to anyone.

you remember 256MB USB, I remember $239 for a 8KB static RAM card!

I'm sorry, but I have a special place in my own little hell for people toting digital distribution and flash media as the 'next thing'. Flash media is, at this point, not entirely reliable. You can only read/write it so many times before it fails (which, I suppose, is true of a lot of storage media, but for different reasons. In this case, the media itself just fails to retain data.) This is why I prefer either a traditional HDD or optical media for archival purposes.
For everyday use, like putting some music in your mp3 player or hopping a few files from system to system, flash is fine, but my confidence in optical media as an archival medium is much higher than my confidence in flash media.

I do have to admit, though, that repairing these holographic disks would be next to impossible, unless a buffer of material on all exposed sides was included. The current 'cleaning' technique operates on the same principle as a pencil eraser: scratch the top bit off until the marks are gone. With this, we'll likely see thicker disks initially.
And finally some commentary on Buddy v. TEC:
Buddy, your debate skills are miserable. It feels a lot better to prove someone wrong without being a total asshat about it than calling them names and triple-posting. Throw out the personal attacks, keep just the facts, and you'll find yourself mowing people down with your formidable intellect in much larger numbers.
TEC:
I hope your lack of response to Buddy's recent posts was not just due to absence.

Overall, in my insignificant opinion it looks like InPhase is legit, but suffers from the ailment we all know and fear: bureaucracy. Talking heads talk, engineers tell them they're lying, and the talking heads just keep talking.

Personally? I'm excited, and hope that the estimate of 18,000 for a drive is inaccurate.

The lastest technology in the future. We love it.

Discturnkey Team