Holographic storage to the rescue in 2006?

I’ve been chasing backup storage for years. It seems as the moment my backup capacity is larger than my hard drive size — like when 80-100MB drives were the standard and I had a 100MB Zip disk — hard drive standard sizes grew. Today, I’ve got two 250GB hard drives in my tower and one 250GB external Maxtor so I can never fully backup both drives.

What I end up doing is backing up to DVD-R at about 4GB’s or so at a time. Crucial files are backed up and I figure I can always reinstall applications. Still, I’d love to simply have greater backup capacity than my hard disks on my main machine and be able to back up *everything* besides all my videos, photos and files on to DVD-R.

Holographic storage to the rescue in 2006?

In an article in New Scientist magazine, 300GB DVD’s are within months of shipping:

A computer disc about the size of a DVD that can hold 60 times more data is set to go on sale in 2006. The disc stores information through the interference of light – a technique known as holographic memory.

The discs, developed by InPhase Technologies, based in Colorado, US, hold 300 gigabytes of data and can be used to read and write data 10 times faster than a normal DVD. The company, along with Japanese partner Hitachi Maxell announced earlier in November that they would start selling the discs and compatible drives from the end of 2006.

There is an older article (from 2000) on PhysicsWeb — or this one on HowStuffWorks — that’s worth a read if you’re interested in more technical background of holographic storage.

Now whether DVD-R’s with that capacity — and affordable recorders for our personal computers — ship in 2006 remains to be seen. But it sure seems like we’re close to massive removable storage media that may finally outpace internal, affordable hard disk storage.