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.
Guess: magnetic memory exists in a high state of potential energy. This facilitates its degradation. While, say, scratches in stone are lower potential energy?
Does it mean that they can be stored at room temperature, in humid conditions, etc? ie. requiring no HVAC/dehumidifiers or whatever else might be needed to reliably store archive media?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
"but how easy will it be to run those drives in 10 years?"
Exactly as easy as it is now? LTO drives are used in the millions globally to back up many exabytes of data. LTO is designed with backwards compatibility. a drive on gen n can read tapes from gen n-1 and n-2 and write to tapes from gen-1.
One could hope. But hope is not a plan and generally complex electronics become increasingly harder to run with obsolescence. And LTO has planned obsolesence (probably because the expectation is that most companies will run drives into the ground with the expectation of upgrading to larger capacities on the roadmap).
Also LTO drives put out noise appropriate for a data center, not bedroom. While this is probably ok if you are into home servers, that’s not for casual use.
Or to put it another way, LTO is a how-hard-could-it-be solution which is fine if you need a new hobby or are making money but not a greenfield solution for most people.
Don’t get me wrong, I have been attracted by the idea of being the kind of person who can say they use LTO at home for some years. But every time I look at it, I don’t want LTO as a hobby any more than I want a eight Pentium Pro Proliant Server as a hobby.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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".
Does it mean that they can be stored at room temperature, in humid conditions, etc? ie. requiring no HVAC/dehumidifiers or whatever else might be needed to reliably store archive media?
That's my charitable interpretation.
Magnetic tape depends on retained energy in the magnetic tape’s ferroparticles; burned-in polymer structures do not. Perhaps that’s what they meant?
> 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.
Is `someone from marketing` an LLM?
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.
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.
You can buy used older gen LTO drives for not too much money.
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.
"but how easy will it be to run those drives in 10 years?"
Exactly as easy as it is now? LTO drives are used in the millions globally to back up many exabytes of data. LTO is designed with backwards compatibility. a drive on gen n can read tapes from gen n-1 and n-2 and write to tapes from gen-1.
Exactly as easy as it is now?
One could hope. But hope is not a plan and generally complex electronics become increasingly harder to run with obsolescence. And LTO has planned obsolesence (probably because the expectation is that most companies will run drives into the ground with the expectation of upgrading to larger capacities on the roadmap).
Also LTO drives put out noise appropriate for a data center, not bedroom. While this is probably ok if you are into home servers, that’s not for casual use.
Or to put it another way, LTO is a how-hard-could-it-be solution which is fine if you need a new hobby or are making money but not a greenfield solution for most people.
Don’t get me wrong, I have been attracted by the idea of being the kind of person who can say they use LTO at home for some years. But every time I look at it, I don’t want LTO as a hobby any more than I want a eight Pentium Pro Proliant Server as a hobby.
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.
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.
> It generally operates at LTO-9 speed.
https://blocksandfiles.com/2025/07/12/holomems-drop-in-holog...
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
> recordable Blu-Ray production ended earlier this year
It looks like it's only Sony that's ending production?
You might be right. Either way, it's a signal.
Reminds me of the storage medium in Brainstorm from 1983.