back to article AON: Give us cash, we'll emit 10TB holographic cube

Access Optical Networks says it has developed a 1.2TB holographic storage cube that can transfer data at 155MB/sec and last longer than 50 years. Oh, and it's done using mirrors – but no smoke. The storage medium is a 1cm cube of photorefractive lithium niobate crystalline material and the claimed cost/GB is $0.11 in 1,000 …

COMMENTS

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  1. GitMeMyShootinIrons
    Thumb Up

    I have a couple of quid in my pocket....

    ...and I've been looking at a new NAS to put me porn on.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    For a moment, I thought the headline said, "ANON", and referenced the near-ubiquitous collective of binary ne'er-do-wells, and said to myself, "What, now they're branching into cloud computing?"

    That'd be interesting to see - an anonymous company. Nobody even knows who's employed, no defined products... Pull that one off for a manufacturing business and I'll be impressed. I don't know who I'll be impressed with, though.

    1. Super Fast Jellyfish
      Happy

      Who?

      Similarly I thought it said EON and wondered what an electricity company would be doing with holographic tech...

  3. Esskay
    Meh

    Ticks all the right boxes:

    Involves the term "hologram" - check

    Is cube shaped - check

    Requires use of a device called a "Spatial Light Modulator" - check

    stores ginormical amounts of data, with ultrafast read and write times - check

    sounds like the future to me!

    Sadly it'll probably still sound like the future in 10 years time, before it suddenly starts to sound like bankruptcy...

    1. Shady
      Happy

      Cue Dr Evil voice

      And frickin' laser beams!

  4. borkbork
    Trollface

    capacity growing to 9.6TB...

    ...so they're making a 2cm cubed one?

    1. Super Fast Jellyfish

      Size

      Nice idea but it fit into your ever slimming phone the height will have to come down to a maximum of 5mm with related increases in other dimensions, not sure if that would cause problems with the R/W set up?

  5. Charles 9

    Haven't I seen this before...?

    As in almost 20 years ago? They've been at "data crystal" tech for a long time now. When I first saw it, they were using a prototype in lieu of CD-ROMs. You'd think they'd have refined it a lot more than they have at this point.

    PS. When I first read the headline, I thought it was a blackmail article, and that the 10TB was a bunch of "juicy secrets".

    1. The Indomitable Gall

      20 years ago....

      20 years ago, the lasers and mirrors required meant while the medium was small, the read/write apparatus was humungous. This was because lasers were more difficult to make, and there was presumably significant power loss in the medium.

      There have been many incremental improvements since then in both media and laser tech, so I'd guess that it's on the cusp of being a commercially viable technology. The last attempt to produce something was a disc, and aimed at the removable media market, and that introduced certain engineering complications.

      These guys have a better chance, as they'll be aiming at the fixed-drive market, and now's a very good time for that, as SSDs have opened the market to non-disk-based systems. It also plays to the miniaturisation trend even more than SSDs - if they can get the power requirements low enough, the next-gen iPod won't only be able to hold your entire CD collection, it'll be able to store your entire DVD collection too... and perhaps even without any additional compression.

      Put this in an Android phone and the era of the truly universal personal portable computer will begin, and office desks the world over will have mobile phone docking stations instead of PCs or laptop stands.

      1. Charles 9

        I hope they DO pull it off.

        Because I've been seeing a lot of "in development" articles and not enough "just about to hit the street" stuff. Revolutionary new tech isn't going to mean much if it can't reach the market.

        I'm particularly interested in this tech since it looks like something right out of science fiction: crystalline data storage with gobs of capacity (of particular interest to me, a Babylon 5 fan).

  6. melt
    WTF?

    oi!

    &deg; not <sup>0</sup>!

  7. Andy 70
    Go

    Mr Flibble wants to know where his holo-whip is.

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