That is the promise of a new holographic digital storage technology being developed by General Electric and coming to a computer near you around 2012. Although not the first commercial holographic storage system—that honor goes to InPhase Technologies’ Tapestry™ 300r holographic drive—GE’s system could be the first one aimed at consumers. (InPhase’s holographic drives, which debuted last year, sell for $18,000 and target broadcasters who need to archive television programs.)
Holographic media can store huge amounts of data because information is encoded in layers throughout the entire disk, not just on a single reflective surface as in today’s optical media. In GE’s system, a single CD-size disk made of plastic will be able to store about 1 terabyte of data, equivalent to 110 typical movie DVDs. This kind of capacity would make it possible to back up all your music, photos, home movies, and e-mails in one place; it would also allow for totally new, extremely data-intensive applications, such as Microsoft’s MyLifeBits project, which aims to capture in digital form everything that happens in an individual’s life. Besides automatically archiving and indexing things like e-mails and text documents, the project includes a wearable camera that snaps a picture at least once every 30 seconds, creating a visual index of every day.
How it Works:
To store data holographically, a laser beam (1) is split in two (2). One half of the beam passes through an array of hundreds of thousands of gates (3). Each gate can be opened or closed to represent a binary 1 or 0. The gates either block or pass the beam, filtering it into a coded pattern, or signal. The other half of the beam, known as the reference beam, is bounced off a mirror (4), so that the reference beam and the signal beam encoded with digital information intersect somewhere within the plastic storage medium (5). Light waves from the two beams interfere with each other, imprinting into the plastic a hologram—a three-dimensional pattern. By varying the angle of the mirror, millions of holograms can be created in the same piece of plastic. To read data from storage, the reference beam alone is used to illuminate the hologram. The resulting image can be read by a sensor and converted back into 1s and 0s.
Buy it Now
Today’s data storage is already impressive; a hologram kit explains the tech behind tomorrow’s.
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2 comments:
another milestone in technology.But its use will be one lined to big instituitions and organizations where they have large storage of data..when it comes to ordinary man one disk is enough for several months.And previously BLUE-RAY disc technology came but many were not aware of it in country like india where the basic needs of people are being questioned..so i would prefer that technology should take a next step in finding an alternative for fuel or food particles to save the ordinary people which is the urgent requirement of the millenium
This is and awesome technology and will help in saving the paper used for printing in offices. The number of trees being cut down will be reduced. A good solution for makingthe world more environment friendly. The aplication maybe onelined but the effect and impact towards conservation of trees is enormous.
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