Can holographic optical storage displace Hard Disk Drives?

Cloud data workloads require both high capacity at low cost and high access rates. Hard Disk Drives are the dominant media in this application as they are low cost, however, Hard Disk Drive technology is seeing declining access rates and a slowdown in capacity scaling. Holographic data storage could disrupt Hard Disk Drives in the cloud since it may offer both high capacity and access rates. However, a challenge with rewritable holographic media is the data durability due to erasure. Here we present a media and workload aware energy optimization framework and show that erasure can be managed. We investigated the optimal Fe concentrations in iron-doped lithium niobate with experimental results supporting a stretched-exponential erasure model. We achieved a record number of reads, and surpassed the previous record for density. Our approach provides an objective assessment the feasibility of such storage technology given component parameters and material properties.