Holograms: A New Storage Medium

Holograms have wowed TV viewers before Trekkies even
existed--they're on trading cards, and they help ensure that
credit cards are the real McCoy. Now, they're being groomed to
store vast amounts of data at a rapid clip.

InPhase Technologies Inc., a storage provider in Longmont, Colo.,
has developed a holographic video-recording system that could
replace the cumbersome optical jukeboxes used for
capacity-consuming applications. Dubbed Tapestry, the system uses
disks installed in slots in the backs of computers. To users,
Tapestry will look like a typical DVD drive, but it will store
100 Gbytes of data--more than 20 times as much as typical DVDs.

The holograms will be inside the disks, with 800 to 1,000 per
3-millimeter-by-3-millimeter area of disk space. Tapestry is
expected to have a transfer rate of 20 Mbytes per second in its
first generation. The system should help stop computers from
crashing when E-mails with large attachments are received. It
should also help computers handle messages with video and audio.
InPhase hopes to ship Tapestry in volume during 2004

International Data Corp. analyst Wolfgang Schlichting knows the
technology sounds like science fiction to many, but says users
should think of it the way they do digital cameras. "It's a
megapixel of information," he says, "capable of storing very
large amounts." - Martin J. Garvey