Japan's Optware Corp announced a roadmap toward commercialization of of its Holographic Versatile Disc (HVD). Six companies are forming an HVD Alliance to promote the technology. Optware claims the new technology will allow them to store up to 3.9 TeraBytes (about 4000 GB) of data on a single disk. In comparison, the modern DVDs hold about 4.7GB, and the upcoming (single layer) Blu-Ray optical format can hold up to 25 GB.

HVD vs. DVD (courtesy: Physorg.com) As in CDs and DVDs, HVD uses a laser to store information on 12-centimeter discs. However, instead of storing data on 2D layers, beams of light interfere with each other, creating 3D patterns within the disc. The company says it will submit three storage media (200GB storage, 30GB credit-card-sized, and 100GB read-only) in the coming years. Their primary consumers might be the health industry/hospitals, whose requirements are set to grow to 363 Peta-Bytes (1 PB = 1024 GB) by 2007.
The transfer data is at over 1 gigabit per second, or 40 times faster than a DVD. The holographic technique also allows for a quieter storage device, with less moving parts, and less affected by RFI (Radio Frequency Interference). In a sense, this technology is of a quantum jump in storage, which allows us to move from 1D (tapes), 2D (current magnetic/optical storage) to 3D.

Physics of Holography (Courtesy: IBM Almaden Research Center) In holographic storage, the interference pattern between a data beam (laser beam encoded with data) and a coherent (monochromatic) beam is stored on a photosensitive medium (photographic plate, crystal cube, etc.). When just the coherent beam is focussed towards the cube, the emitted light is a laser beam encoded with the data.