HVD Drives

A beginner's guide to holographic versatile discs

Imagine a disc the same size as a DVD, but which can hold over 200 times as much information, and can be read at over 40 times the speed of the DVD drive you have in your PC.

Science fiction? No. Welcome to the world of holographic data storage!

Yes, before you even went out and bought that blu-ray laser or HDVD dive, the next technology is just about ready to roll off the production line and into your home.

The system works by storing data in 3D patterns as holograms - ingeniously, the HVD Alliance report that they have managed to solve the most perplexing problems for doing this while retaining the single lens arrangement familiar to the architecture of CDROM drives, but using two lasers in line with eachoter for reference and reading the data patterns.

As information on the new drives becomes more widely available, I shall post further details.

Until then, here are some useful links:

• The HVD Alliance