Holographic data storage or reliability; a status report

Holographic data storage has the potential for high density data storage with fast optical access and very high data transfer rates. Recent progress in consumer electronics provides liquid crystal TVs as spatial light modulators (SLM) and CCDs from video camcorders with excellent performance at an interesting price point. This progress in the component area and recent development of improved recording materials has encouraged the renewal of interest in holographic data storage. This presentation attempts an up-to-date review of the status of holographic data storage and highlights the open technical issues. For holographic data storage to be of technical interest it has to compete with established storage techniques on the basis of cost per megabyte and performance. Key performance parameters are data rate, access time and storage density. For a large capacity holographic storage device, high density of the stored data at low media cost would of course translate into low cost per megabyte. All of this has to be provided reliably, i.e. at a bit-error-rate that compares favorably with conventional storage techniques on media with archival quality. Holographic storage demonstrations have shown the potential for the error free read out of a data page of one thousand by one thousand pixels in one millisecond for a data rate of one Gigabit per second.