The future is here—sort of. InPhase today announced that it has begun bulk shipping its 300GB holographic storage disks. The platters are 1.5-millimeters thick and cost $180 each. That is on top of the initial $18,000 investment for the Tapestry HDS-300R drive. InPhase says that the drives should expand to capacities of 1.6TB by 2010.

Sounds fancy right? Well you should carefully consider this next part. The platters have a 50-year lifespan and they access at just 20MBps. This is in contrast to readily available SATA drives that access at 150MBps. Also, the rewritable version won’t be available until sometime next year.

InPhase begins shipping holographic storage [Register]