1TB on a CD? Holographic storage coming soon

I for one don't have an LTO3

I for one don't have an LTO3 or a super DLT drive, nor do I have $5K to shell out for one of these expensive tape drives. Even though I'm sure that a holographic storage writer will cost quite a bit at first, I can see the cost/disc or cost/GB being a lot more economical than your tape drives and tapes today and in the future.

IBM has been proven wrong on

IBM has been proven wrong on this for good quality media. TDK (which is what I use almost exclusively) has suggested that their CD and DVD blanks will last 70 years.

While I can't say whether that is true, I can say that I have more than several TDK CDs that have lasted longer than 5 years at this point.

As far as transfer rate, 20mb/sec is pretty damn good, but we also have to wait and see what the price point is. If the drives are under $500, then the whole package is simply awesome when compared to ANY tape drive. Still pretty good at double that price.

For 75mb/sec, I'm assuming you are using something like LTO3 that costs like minimum of $5k? Double that if you want a library. Plus the tapes are each probably about $80.

If this new technology comes in at several multiples less in cost of the drive and 10 times less in cost of the media, it's a no brainer which one a company should choose.

If the new drive is reasonably priced, you'd be able to get 4 drives for much less than what an LTO3 drive costs.

That would give you the same transfer rate (and unless you have a really good network or SAN, a multithreaded backup system like Veritas NetBackup and very high speed RAID arrays, you aren't getting 75mb/sec anyhow), 3 times the native storage capacity (400GB for the LTO3 vs 1.2TB for 4 of the new drives) and still a lot less cost for each disk.

If I'm InPhase, that's exactly what I'd be shooting for...but I guess we'll just have to wait and see what they price their products at.

The only problem with this

The only problem with this is that the 50 year life for CDs and DVDs are proving to be much less than 50 years, more like 5 - this from IBM. The same will probably be true here so don't go betting the farm on getting your data back down the line. In addition optical disk still has temperature and humidity issues. I have tape that I have retrieved information from after 20 years of sitting on a shelf. Plus there is a big difference between 20 mb/sec vs. the 75 that I get on tape.