Holographic Storage – Too Little, Too Late?

inPhaseTechnologie’s Tapestry300r can store information on 300GB discs encoded as holograms. Hailed as the next big thing in storage for years, holographic storage did not take off. Of course, there is probably a niche market for these but “cloud storage” based on redundant hard-drives surpasses this level of holographic storage any day in terms of capacity, expandability and even cost per GB.

With a drive priced at 18,000 and $180 for a 300GB disc ($1.66/GB), it is very expensive. But unlike the CD, it seems unlikely that there is enough demand to spur mass production and bring the price down.