GE Uses Holographic Storage To Achieve a 100-Fold Boost in Optical Storage

General Electric has been using the much hyped holographic storage technology to achieve a 100-fold storage space boost over today’s DVDs, while conserving the same standard 12cm disc form-factor. Today’s optical discs can use one or more layers in a succession of 2D storage space. Holographic storage use a spatial light modulator and two beams of light (data and reference) to create “virtual layers”, a lot of them, that exists in the same physical space. [via NYT]

At the moment, the expected cost for this new medium is 10c/GB, which is equivalent to a 1TB drive (street price). Other players in this space include inPhase, which has been selling a 300GB storage system since 2008 and Maxell and its 1.6TB system since 2005.