"The experiments were performed with a femtosecond laser system Pharos (Light Conversion Ltd.) operating at 1030 nm and delivering 8 μJ pulses of 280 fs at 200 kHz repetition rate."
My €0.02 bet is that that means 200 kilobit per second. In layman's terms: about twice as fast as we could send data to Voyager 1 when it was near Jupiter aka 'abysmal'.
"delivering 8 μJ pulses of 280 fs at 200 kHz repetition rate."
8.0E-6 J * 2.0E5/s = 1.6 J/s = 1.6W
So, this laser outputs 1.6W of power (in very short pulses, but that is irrelevant here). Let's assume a LED powered laser. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_conversion_efficiency gives, optimistically, 35% efficiency for a LED. That would mean a single-laser version would use 5W, a 100-laser one 500W of input power.
=> Some improvements are needed before this replaces hard disks at home. We'll see whether there is room for that.
