InPhase Technologies has begun bulk shipping of its 300GB holographic storage disks and drives, the firm said yesterday. The Tapestry HDS-300R drive costs $18,000, with the 1.5mm-thick platters running to $180 a piece. The firm already claims a series of high profile customers, including Turner Broadcasting, the US Geological Survey, and Lockheed Martin. InPhase's roadmap sees a series of capacity increases, with disks expanded to 1.6TB in 2010. Data is currently transferred from the platters, which are expected to have a 50-year lifespan, at 20MB/s (roughly the same as a 16X DVD burner). Despite pitching the price point somewhere in the mid to high-end tape drive, InPhase says it is not interested in the backup market and will concentrate on archiving. InPhase plans to release re-writeable holographic discs in 2008 and to bump up the storage capacity of its media to 1.6TB in 2010.

Until they can significantly drop the price on both the drives and media, I don't see this going anywhere, except maybe for corporate or government customers who need to securely archive many terabytes of data for extended periods of time. And until the technology has some sort of track record, will those kinds of customers even be willing to trust it?