Massive amounts of removable storage

Hot on the heels of my terabyte announcement , vendors have been feverishly working on products to fill my need for huge amounts of data storage. Advancements in traditional hard drive storage have been slowing down, so InPhase (part of Lucent) and Maxell have been working on holographic storage. When this was announced, most of the world said “yeah right” and went back to buying big hard drives.

Maxell has announced that they’ll be actually shipping this stuff in late 2006 ! Initial offerings will fit 300gb on a single removable disk, but the technology should be able to achieve 1.6tb. At 20Mb/s, the initial transfer speed isn’t as good as a modern hard drive, but they say it can scale upwards to 120Mb/s. Still, it probably won’t replace hard drive technology, but if it’s cheap enough, the sheer amount of data capacity there will be very appealing for backups.