Holographic storage specialist InPhase last week said it had managed to squeeze more than 515 billion bits of information into a square inch of storage media - higher than any commercially available data-archive technology, the company claimed.

InPhase said its latest drive and media - branded Tapestry - together provide a data transfer rate of 23MBps - up from the 20MBps announced in November 2005 when Maxell said it would be commercialising InPhase's system, in late 2006. InPhase last week said it was still on track to deliver drives and media to market "later this year".

InPhase re-iterated that the first generation of Tapestry products on the market will offer 300GB of unformatted storage per disk, but it expects to get the capacity up to 800GB and on to 1.6TB. Even the lowest capacity makes next-generation optical disc format's Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD, with their respective dual-layer capacities of, respectively, 50GB and 30GB, pale by comparison. That said, they'll surely be a far cheaper in the near term.

InPhase was founded in December 2000 by Lucent, and has been working on holographic storage - in which data is encoded as a 3D pattern written and read by laser beam - ever since. It isn't the only company promoting holographic storage. Japan's Optware - which is backed by Toshiba, Intel and others - is working on a DVD-sized holographic disc is says will hold more than 1TB of data with a throughput of 1Gbps.

Optware's format is dubbed HVD (Holographic Versatile Disc) and the company is already pushing a 200GB HVD-RW disc type through the HVD Alliance, an organisation supported by Optware, Fuji Photo and half-a-dozen or so Japanese chemicals companies. ®