Camera Phones Plaza

You have some pretty efficient ways of storing data nowadays. HDDs and SSDs on one hand and Flash memory sticks and cards along with CDs/ DVDs and Blu-rays on the other. Let’s not forget about the magnetic tape and the ancient floppies… and maybe ZIP drives. A reasonable variety and some decent prices, I’d say. Am I forgetting something? Oh, the holographic storage devices. Well, you wouldn’t actually buy something like this for now, but let’s take a look at the latest developments in this field.

InPhase‘s 3D Holographic storage device uses holograms and two coherent laser beams - a reference beam and an illumination beam - to create an interference pattern that is recorded on photosensitive media. When a special “reading” laser inside that black box is concentrated on the recorded interference pattern, the original image is reconstructed through 3D means.

Maybe some of you are experts in holograms and sci-fi tech, so please feel free to skip the following stuff if you already have a degree in holography. OK, so these holograms are pretty impressive; some might even say that the Universe could be based on this principle, but I digress. Just imagine that only a small fragment of a hologram can reconstruct the entire data image. So if you happened to store a 3D image, the fragment will not let you move as far to make a full revolution around it. In the case of 2D images, however, it means a scratch isn't fatal.

The holographic R/W device from InPhase uses a 5.25″ film-based clear disk in a cartridge as recordable media. This cartridge has an estimated lifespan of about 50 years and you can use it millions of times over and over again during this time frame. Plus you get to store 300 GB (for now, at least).

Go ahead and pay $18,000 to own one of these, or you can wait for about ten years and buy it for $50 or even less.