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What are the chances this becomes a desktop form-factor alike cd drives?
Zero. There's no market for consumer archival-only storage; magnetic tape has been an enterprise-only product for 20+ years. Even write-once formats are barely holding on; recordable Blu-Ray production ended earlier this year.
It looks like it's only Sony that's ending production?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Zero. There's no market for consumer archival-only storage; magnetic tape has been an enterprise-only product for 20+ years. Even write-once formats are barely holding on; recordable Blu-Ray production ended earlier this year.
> recordable Blu-Ray production ended earlier this year It looks like it's only Sony that's ending production?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Guess: magnetic memory exists in a high state of potential energy. This facilitates its degradation. While, say, scratches in stone are lower potential energy?
That's a clever theory, but the company specifically described it as having "zero energy storage costs ".
That's my charitable interpretation.
1) What on earth do they mean by "zero energy storage"? Magnetic tape doesn't consume energy at idle either. Hell, even hard disks can be powered down. 2) "Also, the optical-based new tech’s touted 50-year life is 10x the life of magnetic tape." Say what? Most magnetic tape is rated for up to 30 years in storage. You might only get a few years out of a tape if you're writing to it frequently... but this new format is…
Sounds really good, but neither the article nor any information I could find on the company says anything about read/write speed compared to other options. I would think that would be a big factor when you're dealing with that much data.
https://blocksandfiles.com/2025/07/12/holomems-drop-in-holog...
I wish we had something better than "walk through multiple hard drives as a data nomad and remember to use them every now and then" as a cost-effective and consumer oriented method for cold storage. I don't even care for the speed. Tape is obnoxious with high up front investments, not even targeting private use, Blu-ray never really became a surefire way and there were too much uncertainty and variety depending on br…
The trouble with holograms, if I understand them correctly, is that when storing information in a phase structure, to change one small part of the information you are storing, the hologram must be adjusted everywhere. The bits are encoded in a way that’s a bit nonlocal. I think a reasonable analogy is how small changes to a structure affect its Fourier transform. The whole thing leaps in Fourier space for a little wi…
When cheap enough, write-once memories are much preferable over read-write memories, for archival and backup purposes.
Magnetic tapes are also normally used as append-only memories and very infrequently, if ever, they may be completely erased in order to reuse the cartridge and avoid buying a replacement.
While it is possible to use a magnetic tape like you would use a HDD, erasing and writing at random positions, there is no reason to do that, because it would be slow and it would not use fully the capacity of the tape.
It is likely that this holographic memory will be used exactly like a tape, i.e. append-only, but it will not be possible to erase the holographic cartridge.
If it would be possible to erase it, I would consider that as a deficiency, by providing an almost useless feature, which must be paid by a lower lifetime, as any material whose properties are reversible is much more likely to lose the information in time.