Tamarack Storage Devices Inc is not going to have holographic storage all to itself it seems: the Austin company announced a landmark stage in its development effort earlier this month (CI No 2,471) but researchers at Stanford University now say they have demonstrated a working prototype of a holography-based storage device and say it could hold massive amounts of data in three-dimensional spaces no larger than two sugar cubes. They say system could store 1,000 times more data than today’s computers and retrieve it 100 to 1,000 times faster. In the new technology, lasers record images on crystal materials in the form of two-dimensional pages, and by varying the angles of the laser recording, multiple pages can be stacked and stored in the same three-dimensional space. The laser beams converge on a location within the crystal cube, and store data by altering the patterns of electrons in the crystals within the cube, but and a key problem is that while retrieval is lightning fast, to store data is still slow – an hour to store 160Kb. The work was described in the August 5 issue of Science, and the researchers are now seeking two patents on the technology and additional funding for their work, which has has cash from the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency. Hughes Aircraft Co and Rockwell International Inc are also researching holographic technology, the San Jose Mercury News notes.
