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.
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.
Or to put it another way, the association of backing up with moral virtue doesn't pass ordinary people's subconscious bullshit detector.
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.
https://blocksandfiles.com/2025/07/12/holomems-drop-in-holog...
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.
I'd be happy to be proven wrong though.
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?
LTO-10 is its future replacement.
It looks like it's only Sony that's ending production?
