Better Holographic Data Storage

Pinlighter writes "Optical holographic data storage has the potential of providing better storage densities and access rates than the magnetic media used today. However, the technology has problems, mostly because the information tends to get a bit scrambled each time it is reread. According to the link, a group of Japanese scientists have now developed a material which is stable for hours and across multiple rereadings. The material also allows easy erasure (by UV light) and rewriting."

Comments

Re:Why is Holographic storage good?

[Daeslin]

I wrote a paper on this way back in college, so this is coming mostly from memory (mine, not holographic), but here's some of the hightlights that excited me:

1) Massive increases in storable data. I believe the example given was the contents of the entire library of congress on a 10 cm/side cube of data.

2) Near ram access times. I believe the actual figure is something like 100 and some odd nanoseconds.

3) AI like ability to perform similarity matches. Not only can you shine a reference beam in and get the data, you can also project the data in and get an echo of similar data elements reference beams. Hence, you could shine in a bitmap, and get back the indices (echos of reference beams actually) of the closest matching chuncks of data in storage. The closest matches produce the strongest echos. I believe the U.S. Army was investigating using this to spot tanks via video cameras. The applications are endless. You've forgotten the name of a song, merely hum a couple of bars into a mic, convert it to wave, submit it and find out that it's similar to a chunck of "Stairway to Heaven".

4) Potentially cheap once all the manufacturing is worked out.

Jello RAM

[demaria]

Here's a project that some people are working on up here at Syracuse University.

Jello RAM. :-) Okay, not exactly, but it's fun to call it that. A very small rectangular cube (about 0.5" by 0.5" by 1.5" or so) is filled with a protein substance suspended in a solution. It is primed by hitting the substance with a laser, and it denatures the protein. Then, a laser is shot through on an X plane, and a different laser hits on certain points on the Y plane. The protein is denatured where the two meet. This substance is a three dimensional memory system. You read back by a similar method, but with a lower power laser beam. The laser doesn't pass through the points that are denatured, and produces a grid of binary numbers essentially. Of course, the protein cube requires no power, so it's perserved when off. Imagine being able to take the ram out of one machine and put it in a different machine, without changing the contents.

These small cubes can hold about 4 gigabytes of data, and last price I heard was $20 (the cubes are practically nothing. They're cheap to make. It's the read/write equipment that costs a bunch). It has decent access speeds, cheap, and very small.

This is all very experimental lab stuff right now, so the size and speed can change. The goal is to make very cheap, small, random access memory. Might be good to replace tape drives. It's several years off though, but money keeps coming in and development continues. Should be nice stuff, keep on the lookout for it.

I saw development stuff in use a year ago when touring that laboratory, so I reserve the right to be incorrect or inaccurate with some of the statements in this post. :-)

Mike DeMaria
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