Holographic ribbon aims to oust magnetic tape with 50-year life span and 200TB

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/storage/holographic-ribbon-aims-to-oust-magnetic-tape-with-50-year-life-span-and-200tb-capacity-per-cartridge-holomem-says-optical-ribbon-based-carts-work-with-some-components-of-existing-systems-reducing-fricition

by freddier • 1 year ago

32 28 1 year ago

tomshardware.com

allears• 1 year ago

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.

altairprime2• 1 year ago

It generally operates at LTO-9 speed.

https://blocksandfiles.com/2025/07/12/holomems-drop-in-holog...

duskwuff4• 1 year ago

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 write-once, so it's not even in the running.

3) People have made wild claims about holographic data storage being the Next Big Thing since the 1980s - in particular, there was a whole wave of them in the late 2000s claiming to have a DVD replacement under development. None of them have brought products to market. I'm not confident this one's going to be any different.

CoastalCoder2• 1 year ago

What on earth do they mean by "zero energy storage"?

My guess is that someone from marketing came up with that bullet point, and the company's actual engineers are torn between eye-rolling and wanting to get very violent on the marketing person.

hammyhavoc• 1 year ago

Is `someone from marketing` an LLM?

JumpCrisscross• 1 year ago

Guess: magnetic memory exists in a high state of potential energy. This facilitates its degradation. While, say, scratches in stone are lower potential energy?

duskwuff4• 1 year ago

That's a clever theory, but the company specifically described it as having "zero energy storage costs".

altairprime2• 1 year ago

Magnetic tape depends on retained energy in the magnetic tape’s ferroparticles; burned-in polymer structures do not. Perhaps that’s what they meant?

catwhatcat• 1 year ago

What are the chances this becomes a desktop form-factor alike cd drives?

duskwuff4• 1 year ago

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.

dehrmann• 1 year ago

recordable Blu-Ray production ended earlier this year

It looks like it's only Sony that's ending production?

CoastalCoder2• 1 year ago

Anyone know the history of long-term reliance on proprietary technologies?

I.e., how often does it actually work out for the adopters?

Are their licensing / escrow schemes the meant to mitigate the risks from the original supplier going out of business? How often do those schemes pay off?

jug• 1 year ago

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 brand.

UltraSane2• 1 year ago

You can buy used older gen LTO drives for not too much money.

brudgers4• 1 year ago

Sure, but how easy will it be to run those drives in 10 years? Mechanical issues, driver issues, etc.

And already you have to be really committed to backing up to go down that rabbit hole. LTO is lots of different standards that evolved over many years.

Just for clarity, I am not suggesting that the holographic tape in TFA is better.

brudgers4• 1 year ago

There's nothing better for consumers because backing up is not a consumer behavior. Backing up is a business behavior and because it is a business behavior people pay other people to do it.

Or to put it another way, the association of backing up with moral virtue doesn't pass ordinary people's subconscious bullshit detector.

alienbaby• 1 year ago

The lto10 info and stats are wrong? It's 30TB / 75Tb compressed. Read write many, and can hit speeds of 1GB/s ? I didn't read any info on the write and then read speeds of this holotape.

adrian_b2• 1 year ago

I assume that they have meant LTO-9, i.e. 18 TB cartridges, which is the tape standard currently in use.

LTO-10 is its future replacement.

EvanAnderson• 1 year ago

I am reminded of the story from the early 2000's about researchers who were storing data on sticky tape. This came up on HN a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26040009

muhdeeb• 1 year ago

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 wiggle in direct space. I foresee that being troublesome for write operations.

adrian_b2• 1 year ago

I assume that this is write-once memory.

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.

brudgers4• 1 year ago

Write once is the only form of reliable backup. Once you start erasing data from an archive, you have introduced the most likely vector for losing data...human errors of judgement.

_spduchamp• 1 year ago

Reminds me of the storage medium in Brainstorm from 1983.

nullsmack• 1 year ago

New storage tech like this never ever comes out.. I remember 300gb or 500gb holographic discs touted 20 years ago.. every other storage tech like that since then has been announced and never made. IBM had a millipede project that used MEMS probes to read/write data at a density of 1 terabit per square inch.. never came out. Countless other examples that I'll never remember exist. Never came out.

I'd be happy to be proven wrong though.

Holographic ribbon aims to oust magnetic tape with 50-year life span and 200TB

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