VideoHousing all this information presents problems. Tape drives are fine for archiving material, but they're slow. Disk drives are faster, but they become unstable as more information is crammed into less space.
The likely solution? In the long run, holographic storage. First conceived in the 1940s, holographic storage exited the realm of science fiction when lasers arrived on the scene in the 1960s, and the concept finally took flight with the advent of cheap, mass-produced lasers for CD players and other gizmos. In January, Longmont, Colorado-based InPhase Technologies announced the manufacture of a prototype holographic storage drive. A rival, Aprilis Inc., in Maynard, Massachusetts, hopes to have a holographic drive on the market in two years that will hold 200 gigabytes (DVDs hold a tenth of that). Another vendor, Colossal Storage, intends to unveil a 3-D disk by 2009 that holds a staggering 100 terabytes.
Terabytes aside, the transfer rates of holographic storage devices may prove to be the real plus for data miners. The Aprilis drive is expected to retrieve data at 75 megabytes per second. Experts believe transfer speeds for holographic drives may one day reach 10 gigabytes per second. At that rate, a data search that would tie up a conventional engine for 40 seconds or longer will take just a third of a millisecond to complete. A whole millisecond would be fast enough for us.
John Goff is technology editor of CFO.
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