LOL I've done holographic data storage in borosilicate glass using fs laser pulses for my masters thesis in physics more than a decade ago and guess what, this is not going anywhere. The claims are all wildly exaggerated also. Lots of buzzwords micro nano plasma explosions but the truth is hidden in the details: needs specialist hardware... Yeah like a 50.000 USD femto second laser setup that needs an entire basement and you wearing ski googles at all times to not get blind type of specialist hardware. Guess we're all gonna put that in our living rooms, won't we?

And the storage density is limited by all kinds of effects that I won't even get into it but you can roughly assume its at best half or even less of that and then it starts becoming much less impressive.

Yes you can microwave a slab of glass or go diving with it and it will still be intact but unless we make machines that read and store data much more easily, like significantly absurdly more easily, this is the biggest pipe dream of them all.

Cool tech though :)

It doesn't have to be consumer hardware to be economically viable. I can imagine something like this replacing or complementing tape storage at data centers. We already have hard drives filled with gas for dust-proofing. For archival storage it does not have to be fast (in terms of latency) it just needs to be reliable with high data density.

Hard drives where the size of a car decades ago, we could now have archival storage of the same physical size that can hold petabytes (just guessing, didn't do the actual math).

Agreed. On the other hand: didn’t any cool tech start as a overpriced, oversized version of its later breakthrough product?

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