Although storage space is no longer the premium it once was, physical backups and external media have been slow to catch up. While recordable DVDs may be fine for backing up a single workstation, large servers are still forced to rely on swappable drives and tape backups. But holographic disc technology could be changing all of that in the very near future.
Holographic Versatile Discs (HVDs) have been in the works for some time now by various companies, including InPhase Technologies (formerly part of Lucent) and Japan's Optware (which claimed to have made the first recording of a movie on a holographic disc last year). InPhase's HVDs, scheduled for release in 2006, are said to hold 300GB of data, 60 times that of a conventional DVD with only a slight increase in size. That translates to more than a day's worth of HD-quality video. Not to mention the drives themselves can read and write at ten times the speed a normal DVD drive.
One of InPhase's partners in HVD research, Maxell, is working towards even more storage on a 1.6TB disc.
