In terms of absolute performance, Spectral Hole Burning memories have impressive potential. At this tremendous areal density, only about ten thousand atoms are used to store each bit. In more advanced implementations, the introduction of limited parallelism using holographic methods, will support substantially higher aggregate transfer rates. Current frequency-selective recording materials have serious limitations that rule out certain classes of application including many of those typically associated with magnetic storage. Presently, storage materials must be maintained at temperatures somewhere in the 5-70 K range in order to display optimal characteristics.
Materials also have limited storage times ranging from milliseconds to days.
These limitations can be accommodated. Spectral Hole Burning memories provide both speed and capacity. Spectral Hole Burning memories with these characteristics fall between semiconductor RAM and magnetic disk in performance. The microsecond-scale latency time is more than a thousand times shorter than available in rotating disk systems. Systems requiring high volume access to small files will benefit dramatically from this performance increase.