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... if you scratch one of these? :-

Please no. Can someone tell them to stop working on CDs already? Seriously, HD-DVD is no more than a smaller vinyl. We've got the same technology for over 100 years and they're still trying to "improve" it?
Can someone already remove all the moving (spinning) parts of my laptop? I really do not see the point of including 3 different motors in a XXI century technology.

I wish this type of tech would develop into something in the form factor of the minidisc. I still have my music mindiscs, some of them about 10 years old. There's something about that size, the protective case, and even the colors that makes the form factor interesting. I'd love to be able to have a ~300GB Truecrypt container on a rewritable minidisc-type thing.

I've always found DVDs/CDs too large. Yes, they make mini-cdrs and mini-dvds (I used to have a Sony CD Mavica) but they don't have the protective case the minidiscs had. Some things are just ergonomically right, and I regret that we didn't go a little further in that direction.

Once your bored of them you can use them as a holodeck in your ant farm :)

...for these disks. Will need 10GB for the movie itself, and 490GB for the DRM software.

More storage makes it easier to tak backups but with more storage I will also store more data and then the backups will get larger and.. :(

... a thousand times. The traditional 2D-technology is uncompetitive since the end of the 1990s.
The cutting edge of optical disks are HD-DVDs als BR-Discs with up to 50 Gigs, but even todays
harddisks can store an entire terabyte of data. At the beginning one or two CD-Rs where able to
store the content of a common harddisk, today you would need dozens of expensive BR-Discs to
backup all that stuff. A holographic storage system with 500 Gigs or more should be the past,
not the future. The industry failed at this point. They try to sell us an old, but badly advanced
technology from yesterday.

I hope this is chance for Newcomers. New smaller companies with good and really innovative
products. But my fear is that the power in public relations of the present giants of the market
will prevent it. Wouldn't be the first time that bad technology wins the race.

Come on, we get these announcements every few weeks, but nobody ever delivers a product. This isn't even news for nerds, it is just vaporware. Wake me up when they create a product that I can actually buy.

Holographic this and that for what the last 15 years, and no product to date that is worth anything? Duke Nukem Forever will hit the shelves before this "just around the corner" tech ever will.

Optical media is garbage and always has been and is an overly fragile way to store data. It's only redeeming feature is once the discs get bellow $1 they effectively become disposeable.

In another year or so, flash chips will reach a price point that'll make them a cost effective alternative for buying movies on DVD's, they've already reached that point for music CD's.

Once the industry notices that, and gets over their DRM OCD, I say good riddance to optical media.

Good! Now let's make two incompatible standards out of it, start a formats war, and sell the same old films to the same old people again, in both formats if possible.

I hope they have two new competing formats!

Seriously though, they have been talking about huge storage disks since we discovered round plastic circles. Yeah, they've been getting higher data densities, but if you look at the progression of other storage formats (especially hard drives) optical is just not keeping up. By the time we get 500Gb disks, they'll sound to us much like yesteryear's 40Gb disks sound to us now compared to our 500+Gb hard drives.

InPhase Technologies [inphase-tech.com] have a system that writes 300GB holographic discs and they have a roadmap that goes to 1.6TB.

They cost [inphase-tech.com] 18K for the drive and $300 for the discs.

They are expensive now, but when they drop they will make it worthwhile.

All of the Simpsons, the Complete Bach, the complete Mozart, the complete Beethoven all together on one disc.

Holographic Memories; Scientific American, November 1995, by Psaltis & Mok

It does make some sense to spin a disk rather than reorient the beam. But a solid crystal holographic storage device not only has lots of locations within itself to store collections of data, but can also be turned on a turntable and have the beam attack it from different directions, storing more data in the same place but at a different angle.

3D holographic storage design has another benefit -- it is self-searching via "reverse" holography. You shine a laser off a target and let it reflect to the memory, and out comes as many copies of the reference beam as their are stored data sets (with a realistic situation of most dissimilar results being buried in noise). Each beam is proportional to the strength of the reference beam according to the similarity of the dataset it came from. You can pick the strongest if you want to find the closest match, or you can statistically test the range of beam strengths to check for uniqueness of the target, or any number of things. The search process is virtually instantaneous, the speed of getting the result limited only by the speed of the measuring and calculating processes.

Microholography Could Lead to 999 TB Discs --- well, it could.
I'm willing to say, Microholography Could Lead to 999,999,999,999,999,999 TB Discs. All of these statements are true, yet meaningless.

A frozen pig could fly out of the poster's arse too. well, it could happen, right?

Mod me troll, please.

The only problem I see is that at a rate of 200Mb/sec as stated in the article, it would take over 11 hours to fill a 1TB disk!