InfoWeek reports that Hitachi plans to begin sampling a 5″, 200gb holographic disk in 2005 and incorporate the technology into drive system in 2006. According to Infoweek, Hitachi hopes to increase capacity to 400gb in 2007.
Tom’s Hardware has more technical details about InPhase, the holographic disk company that Hitachi acquired and which will actually be producing holographic drives for the company. According to Tom’s Hardware,
The prototype drive records data into InPhase’s patented two-chemistry photopolymer WORM material. The recording material is 1.5 mm thick and is sandwiched between two 130 mm diameter transmissive plastic disk substrates, the company said. The prototype can arrange more than one million bits of data into a single page, which is recorded with a single flash of a 407 nm laser beam, according to InPhase. Multiple pages of data, referred to as a book, are recorded in one spot on the disk providing approximately 12 MByte of data in a single book location.
The holographic disk will apparently be available eventually in sizes up to 1.6 TB.