As we’ve seen traditional optical storage smash the boundaries of conventional storage, so will holographic storage techniques do to optical. While a CD can hold 783 megabytes of data and a double-sided, double-layer DVD can hold 15.9 GB of data, holographic memory offers the possibility of storing 1 terabyte (TB) of data in a sugar-cube-sized crystal. Early holographic data storage devices will probably have capacities of 125 GB and transfer rates of about 40 MB per second. Eventually, these devices could have many times the capacity and data rates of more than 1 GB per second.
A number of former Bell Labs scientists who were working on materials and holographic memory research have joined forces at startup InPhase Technologies. InPhase now owns the rights to the intellectual property developed at Bell Labs, and believe that they may have an initial product launch in 2006.