InPhase's 1.6TB holographic optical drive

It's been a few months since someone announced a major breakthrough with some fantastically capacious new storage format, the last time around was Pioneer's 500GB ultraviolet laser optical disc, and then before that those 300GB holographic discs from Optware, now InPhase is pimping a holographic drive that uses optical discs that could potentially store as much as 1.6TB of data (as in terabytyes, as in a crazy amount of storage space). It's just a prototype (there is nary a word on pricing or availability), which means our wiseass plan of skipping over HD DVD and Blu-ray and going straight to the 1.6TB motherlode probably won't fly, but InPhase says they're using the same kind of of blue lasers developed for Blu-ray drives and Hitachi Maxell is developing the storage medium.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

[gorgon @ Dec 19th 2005 12:09AM]

one of these could backup an entire small to medium size office's complement of computers, not to mention days of hd

[Subliminal Fusion @ Dec 19th 2005 12:09AM]

Wow- with something like this, I could (most likely) store all my music in a lossless format in one place! I have somewhere around 1300 purchased CDs, and while I haven't calculated exactly how much space it would take up, I seem to remember somewhere around 1-1.5TB. It's something like a month and a half's worth of music...

[grey eminence @ Dec 19th 2005 12:09AM]

Atomic Holographic Optical Nanostorage INFINITE REWRITABLE Disk using 5 nm particle with 100 u in. coating = ~ 1.5 EXABYTES of data storage

1.5 Exabytes equals 1536 Petabytes or 1,572,865 Terabytes per each 100 u in. of coating

[Permanent4 @ Dec 19th 2005 12:09AM]

grey eminence: Dude, how much porn do you have?

[syzygy @ Dec 19th 2005 12:09AM]

Uh... Quick calculations...
Maximum Size for 1300 CDs

1 CD
74min * 60sec/min * 150KB/sec / 1024KB/MB = 650Megabytes

650MB * 1300CDs / 1024MB/GB = 825Gigabytes

Most lossless audio compression gets you about 2:1

825GB * 1/2 = 413GB

so that new Hitatchi 500GB Hard Drive should do you just fine.

[syzygy @ Dec 19th 2005 12:09AM]

Oh yeah...

1300cds * 74minutes/cd / 60minutes/hour / 24hours/day = 66Days

[Falkenad @ Dec 19th 2005 12:09AM]

why are the early concepts of any optical drive seem huge? I just think making it fit into a 5.25" drive bay would be logical.

[wreck @ Dec 19th 2005 12:09AM]

In response to Falkenad, this is a prototype -- basically demonstrating the technology. Slimming it down and into shapes that are more manageable shouldn't come into play so soon. Especially with technology that is unwieldly or not fully developed yet.

[Sean @ Dec 19th 2005 12:09AM]

Sweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet!

[Nate S. @ Dec 19th 2005 12:09AM]

Nice comment Sean. Falkenad, shut up! 1.6 TB in a 5 1/4" drive is pretty good considering that Hitachi's PR does a few gigs on a 2". In agreement w/ Wreck, they wont make it tiny at first, after the prototype that demonstrates how and that it truly does work, they start making the advances in size. I highly doubt that the first CD Drive was the size they are now.

[AnyKill @ Dec 19th 2005 12:09AM]

Remember the first VideoDisc (VIDEOLASER)
size of one vinyl disc!

[AnyKill @ Dec 19th 2005 12:09AM]

Remember the first VideoDisc (VIDEOLASER)
size of one vinyl disc!