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I haven't spent enough time studying the details of current holographic disc technology to know how it's handled. I'm just pointing out that holographic medium have more inbuilt potential for data redundancy than the surface data-only pitted optical discs we've been using for so long. Also, it's not exactly new technology. InPhase Technologies + their Tapestry project have been around for at least half a decade. http://www.inphase-technologies.com/

Awww screw your damned flying car, where are my holographic discs already!!! I got lots of stuff to back up, you got lots of stuff to back up, we all got tons of stuff to back up people! We got all these big fricking drives and haven't had an affordable optical backup medium since DVD!
Don't give me that Blu Ray crap either, as we all know that was Sony's way of pushing lots of DRM. Last i checked you can't even play a burnt BD on a set top BD player, or watch BD movies on your PC! So instead of something made by a media company trying to push their multimedia DRM crap, how about a nice holographic disc made from the start for data like DVD was. Then it will become popular, the media companies will be forced to go with it since BD will end up another Laserdisc, and we can all be happy with nice shiny 400+ holodiscs.

Here you go - although it's not out yet...

In short, he's an expert on holographic materials. So, yeah, he knows what he's talking about. Disclaimer: His old PhD supervisor is my current one, but I don't know him.

Holographic display technology is a long way away from going into TVs. There's a lot of active research on it, as well as on holographic data storage (there's an obvious overlap), which is actually commercially available (c.f. Inphase), though it hasn't much market share yet.

Which means there is no going back once the disk is written.

Just thought I'd mention it.

http://www.inphase-technologies.com/products/default.asp?tnn=3

it's actually available, apparently, but i'm pretty sure it's ridiculously priced. it's certainly not targeted at the average consumer.

i've been anxiously waiting for news of a consumer-level product for 2 years now. alas, still not in sight.

Most of the early adopters of holographic storage are the TV/Film industry - primarily because of the 300Gig capacity and 50 year archival life.

Inphase Tech

hologram storage

Just not exactly mainstream.

Capacity 300GB to 1.6TB (2010), media from $180 list price, drive at 18,000$.

And it is used.

CC.

Vendors have been promising us high density compact discs for years, and we have yet to see them make a dent into the market. HVD for instance, which was developed by Optware and announced back in 2004, promised storages sizes up to 3.9TB or more per disc by 2010. So far the only company to produce a product based on the HVD technology has been InPhase Technologies. Their Tapestry unit costs a mere $18,000 USD for the drive and another $180 USD for the media. HD-DVD and Blu-Ray are no exception to this either. If any of these formats are to compete with current storage trends, they will need to become cheap and affordable compared to other forms of storage.

You can already buy 300GB disks made by InPhase technologies and HVD disks should have been released somewhere near the end of last year....

InPhase claims that they should be able to fit up to 1.6TB on a slightly larger than DVD disk...

Patents, however might be the reason that the technology would be unlikely to reach reasonable prices soon...

oooookay, why are you still waiting?
http://www.inphase-technologies.com/products/defau lt.asp?tnn=3
It's been commercially available for years and years and years. 1.6 TB on one disk with 120 MB/sec read speed. Yeah it's write once but still.

An article from MaximumPC caught my eye recently, and while it's not a TB, it IS holographic storage....

http://www.inphase-technologies.com/

I'd stay far away from open source in the realm of investing. Open source naturally just has a disadvantage that...you know...it's FREE! Depending on how long you can keep it invested, I would put the majority of it in holographic storage technology like from InPhase http://www.inphase-technologies.com/investors/inde x.html. I personally have followed the development for years since I first heard of the technology and it's going to be commercially available within a very short time and with even just the experimental read/write speeds they've actually accomplished, it's gonna blow quantum, flash, and advanced magnetic storage away. Put at least some in google too if you wanna risk it but that's what people have been saying for years and it's never turned out bad :P And whatever's left over, put it in anything related to anti- global warming/mass starvation/weatger natural disasters technologies cuz you know those are gonna be huge in the next couple years.

average user can't afford it yes but it does not mean it is not useable. turner networks has been using holographic storage for their media for quite some time now. http://www.inphase-technologies.com/news/turnerona ir.html

dunno about price, but InPhase says their write speed is 20 MB/s, equivalent to 16x on a DVD. InPhase's initial release is supposed to be later this year. price will probably be way up there, but hopefully it'll be reasonable in a few years.

In four years, either Blu-ray or HD-DVD will most likely be somewhat standardized

How bout something like this instead.

While Googling for "bits per square inch world record", I found a company claiming 515 gigabits per square inch. Here come the terabyte discs!

"Add to that they have to re buy all their dvd's that they are still pissed about rebuying from vhs" Hah! Just wait soon as they're done reselling us all our DVDs on HD-DVD they'll sell em to us AGAIN on HD-DVD Superbit! And, of course, five years from now we'll be buying them all over on our new holographic media players... http://www.inphase-technologies.com/ Or in a new format designed for 3d? http://www.aist.go.jp/aist_e/latest_research/2006/ 20060210/20060210.html Personally, I can't wait for the MPAA to start selling licenses to content... then, maybe each time it comes out in new media we'll get it for free....

From the original press release they are claiming they demonstrated 515 gigabits per square inch. Presumably the media they use has more than one square inch because they claim their first product will sport 300 gigabytes of user data and a 23 megabytes/second transfer rate.

The official press release

It answers a lot of questions that people have been having. It is 0.5 Terabit per square inch... it is 20 Megabyte per second transfer rate.. etc.

...user transfer rates of 235MBit/s for writing and 117MBit/s for reading.

Read the press release; it actually is 20 megabytes per second, not 20 megabits per second.

According to this video, the media can be stored for 50 years, and it also looks more like a replacement for tape backups than hard drives at this point.

Coupled with this article, which says that it's "10 times faster than a normal DVD burner (whatever that means)," and holds about 300GB (278 GBytes formatted) it's clear that they're aiming for removable media.

Apparently each 300GB disk is about the size of a DVD (but thicker due to it having it's own little shell, like a floppy/zip/mini disk). Just like all removable media, it needs its own drive. Unlike most, it needs a HUGE drive, about the size of one of the old tape drives (2xCD-ROM drives but longer).

It's an interesting backup solution, maybe if you got a bunch of these and made a RAID-0 across them, you'd have something really cool.

The first generation drive has a capacity of 300 gigabytes on a single disk with a 20 megabyte per second transfer rate.

The write transfer rate is determined by the time required to position the laser at the correct angular address, the speed of the shutter, the laser power, and the exposure time. In this demonstration the average exposure time per page was 2.7 milliseconds, which translates into a user write transfer rate of 23 megabytes per second.

InPhase will be the first company to deliver a holographic product for professional archive applications in late 2006. The media for this product will be offered through its strategic partner Hitachi Maxell Ltd. The initial InPhase Tapestry holographic recording device will record 300 gigabytes (GB) of data onto a 130 mm disc with a transfer rate of 20 megabytes per second (MB/s). This is compatible with high-definition television transmission rates, and high-end enterprise computer applications.

I was looking for some details on the storage mechanism

Click on the link to InPhase Technologies, click on their press releases... hey, there it is! Looks to me like they're trying to use CD/DVD-like discs to provide backwards compatibility. As for longevity of the medium, their web site seems to indicate they're still perfecting that part of the technology.

http://www.inphase-technologies.com/news/Tapestry_ 4000.html

"Holographic storage is a revolutionary departure from all existing recording methods because it takes advantage of volumetric efficiencies rather than only recording on the surface of the material. InPhase will deliver the industry's first holographic drive and media later this year. The first generation drive has a capacity of 300 gigabytes on a single disk with a 20 megabyte per second transfer rate. The first product will be followed by a family ranging from 800GB to 1.6 terabyte (TB) capacity."

I think Blu-ray and HD-DVD are losing tech. Why go that way when you can still use red lasers in Holographic Disk technologies.

Hitachi Holographic Disk

I guess you didn't keep up with what InPhase had this year's CES show earlier this week.
http://www.inphase-technologies.com/news/Tapestry_ 4000.html

300 GB of storage/disk ramping up to 1.6TB, no DRM It's still not available (so that's an issue), but neither are Bluray or HD-DVD.

http://www.inphase-technologies.com/news/terabyte_ benchmark.html

Here's a link to the company's web site.

Inphase in January introduced their prototype.

Where is the news on this ?

See here.

I know people have made this claim before, but seriously - they've demonstrated completely working prototypes and have a product line set for release this year.

In addition to the other benefits, this will allow small, PC based drives to get into the TB range.

Here's a tutorial on Holographic storage: http://www.inphase-technologies.com/technology/

Tech Live on TechTV showed a similar technology last week:

http://www.inphase-technologies.com/products/tapes trymedia/

this company is claiming 2GB in a postage stamp, and 100-200GB for a 120mm Disk.

If I read it correctly, they are saying massive data storage, not massive memory. Memory would imply in-system, local storage on relatively small terms (think RAM). I think what they are pointing to is large data storage. SImply speading up HD spindle times won't cut it. Personoally, I'm intrigued by the work of companies like InPhase who are working on holographic data storage. It's going to take thinking out of the box to continue to revolutionize the computing industry.

--Joe

inphase holography

By the way.

The future is holographic storage and there are already protoypes. They are just expensive. Technology is here. Pictures and media here

By the way the cable and phone companies are really like the mafia. Very evil. Expect to pay alot for VOD .

...Since I submitted this a couple of days ago:

100+GB samples in 2003 Apparently they have prototype hardware working today.

See 10 Terabyte 3.5" disk drive, here is your PDF. It might not be here yet, but it falls in the category of "optical" anyway. Also see this, they have existing demos.

Here is a (somewhet incomplete) answer to the two questions everyone seems to have about 2TB of data:

1) Where would you store it?
Well, you could store it in a holographic Tapestry drive. The prototype, just unveiled a few months ago, stores 100GB in a removable disk, and that is nowhere near the max density of the technology. In their section on projects for the tech, they say that a floppy-sized disk should hold about 1TB in a couple years. Impressive.

2) What would you do with it?
Well, other than high-definition video or scientific experiments, nothing on your own PC, unless you are making a database of all the MP3s ever made or backing up the Library of Congress. But on a file server, you could easily use this much space. The 2TB limit will probably never affect most home users (realizes he will be quoted as an idiot in 10 years when 50TB HDs are standard). On the other hand, Tapestry will probably be useful in portable devices, esp video cameras.

2001-01-30 17:11:54 Holographic Data Storage (articles,tech) (rejected)

I supply (again) the links to the Lucent site, complete with the original press release of 30 Jan 2000 with all the links including the movies, and everything else

Next time I'll remember to use smaller words in the submission.

sometimes people don't get it even if you supply pictures.