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Holographic Storage For The Masses
jmoo writes: "Ars Technica has an article on startup company looking to produce holographic storage for commercial sale. The company, InPhase, supposedly is backed by Lucent and is predicting storage densities of 300 gigabits per square inch." "Backed by Lucent" certainly sounds a lot less sketchy than the repeated but never confirmed claims of extremely dense storage using multi-layer CD-ROMs.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
What happened to Terastore, and their "near field recording"? Their web site seems to be kaput. When they first announced that they were developing products using this technology, it sounded impressive, but conventional magnetic storage seems to have improved more than most people expected. But still, they were supposed to have 10G on a cheap removable media, and IIRC they'd actually demonstrated a preproduction system.
yeah, but everyone is laying off... The recession is a real thing. People are scared for one reason or another.
I was thinking about this though. Seems like awfully good timing to announce such a "breakthrough". I am VERY wary of anything that isn't concrete and I don't see in front of me. Hell, Transmeta even came out w/a concrete product and I am not impressed. We shall see.
I don't recall the name of the company, but I don't think it was a big company.
Seastead this.
Actually, I'm more sure now that it was about ten years ago. I remember it was the same year as Desert Storm. :)
:)
Also, it wasn't Kyoto University, it was definitely in the USA. In fact I think it was Stanford University. I distinctly remember a picture of a white guy (i.e. NOT a Japanese guy) above the story with an American name holding a little plastic cube. Shrug. He could have been a white guy at Kyoto University I suppose
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
From the article:
Diaz said he believes the technology will enable "point-of-sale kiosks" where consumers would purchase movies stored on very cheap media, or be incorporated into information systems for data archiving and retrieval.
Huh? I can already buy movies stored on very cheap media - DVDs. The discs themselves aren't expensive - it's just that the MPAA (& assorted companies) charge through the nose for them.
Why doesn't the gene pool have a life guard?
300 Gb = 293MB per inch^3.
Therefore a 40gig drive would require 137 cubed inches - something that won't likely fit inside an open drive bay.
(About the size of 4.5 VHS tapes)
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May the sacred call of the dogcow guide you down the path towards nerdvana.
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Does anyone actually have a Java program designed to control air traffic, or for the operation of a nuclear facility?
I don't know about 10 years ago, but I do recall seeing a lot of coverage of Tamarack Storage Devices developing holographic storage in 1993. Here's a link: http://www.manhattsci.com/technology/holographic_s torage/index.htm
for a brief summary and history of the company as well as a link to a page with an explanation of how the technology works.
Tamarack Storage Devices was later acquired by
Manhattan Scientifics, Inc.
For a wider overview of holographic storage, take a look at: http://www.enteleky.com/holography/ (Note: The site's title is "Holoquest.com" even though that is not the name of the actual web site.)
Anyway, Yes, this technology has been talked about for seemingly forever. I'll believe it when I can buy one for my PC. My hope is they get it working soon enough that it isn't outstripped by "conventional" storage technology advances (remember bubble memory?). Back in 1993, a "HUGE" 1 GB drive cost $1000! Not only do they have to get the technology working reliably, but it must be able to compete economically in the marketplace.
is holographic storage and how does it compare to our current media. From the word holographic I assumed some sort of three dimensional storage instead of 2D disks, but the 100 gigabits/square inch threw that guess in the recycle bin. Could someone enlighten me?
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I'm just an ordinary man with nothing to lose.
Don't knock multilayer discs too quickly. Constellation 3D announced a fortnight ago that they have made a partnership to produce their flourescent multilayer discs.
According to the article we can expect 100Gb discs and 10Gb credit cards on the market by mid-2002. C3D claims a limit of 1Tb (on a disc) that they will be able to reach in a few years. This is as promising as other holographic media, if not more so.
i-name =twylite [http://public.xdi.org/=twylite], see idcommons.net
When CD technology was invented that the standards were finalized the only content control was the fact that a CD was 650 MB wide. Of course no one in the entertainment industry thought that computer hardware could *possibly* one day match and exceed their technology.
It did, and because of that, there was a rather weak encryption placed on DVD's. They entertainment industry couldn't beleive that there was a *possibility* of anyone cracking CSS.
Someone did.
If you think that any new media type available in the next decade will be free of industry-mandated content controls, you're sorely mistaken. I'm not saying they won't be broken, they'll just be better than CSS.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
That Lucent have invested in them doesn't say much. Lucent are investing in, and/or signing partnerships with lots of bleeding edge technology companies which may or may not pay out, but where the payoff if the manage to reach the storage goals set will be too large to be ignored.
I found two other stories on Slashdot from the past year about holographic storage. Spiffy a technology as it sounds, it would be really nice if someone would just freakin' come to market with a product already.
I remember reading about, hmm, it must have been almost ten years ago now, in the New York Times, and article about holographic storage under development at some university. They had prototypes that could do some huge amount of data (probably a gig or something, at the time that would have been huge) in a polymer cube one centimeter on a side.
It would be SO nice if this would stop being a pipe dream and become reality. Disk access is by far the thing that slows me down the most when computing. Superfast, super-high density permanent storage keeps sounding almost too good to be true...
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Or the Lucent whose stock has taken a dive along with everyone else?
And this "backing by Lucent" is supposed to inspire confidence?
People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it.
Here's a direct link to the actual article.
At a repletech conference three years ago,I saw a guy from Lucent give a talk about this. At that point, they had built a system from off the shelf components that worked. They had acheived something like 40gb on a 5.25" platter. He was predicting that they would be to market in three or four years with a 150 gb system. His goal was 250gb plus on a 5.25" disk.
This was a real system. Based on the talk, my company at the time initiated some discussions with Lucent. My company was a Japanese giant that was into many kinds of data storage media. They took it seriously.
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.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
A standard CD has 15.315 square inches of active area on its surface.
At 300gb/sq.in. a standard CD could hold 575.3gb. Thus it would only take two disks to finally get to my magical holy grail of owning my own
!!!!****T-E-R-A-B-Y-T-E*****!!!!.
I'll take two please.
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
GeneralEmergency
I remember seeing an article on IBM's R&D site a few years about developing holographic storage. I never really heard much after that... This is what I managed to dig up on their current site... it's a nice little overview: http://www.can.ibm.com/he/multiversity/Sum98/holog raph.html
-Gabe
Great, now when I find myself searchig for more spaces for my mp3/pron collection, I can just cook up a batch of jello. I can probably get a greater bit density by using different colors from the different flavors.
Would I be able to store more info in blue-rasberry as opposed to cherry due to the wavelength difference?
I guess this brings a new meaning to home-brewed system.
Yep, I never spell check.
More incorrect spellings can be found he
Another product for the "I'll care about it when I can input my credit card and order it" file.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
storage does not merely mean layered storage, as in the scotch tape and multi layer DVD examples.
In holographic storage a photosensitive medium is exposed to the interference pattern that is generated when an object laser beam, with the data encoded in it, is intersected by a second, coherent laser beam. The photosensitive medium will then replicate these interference fringes as a change in optical absorption. Data is retrieved from the medium by exposing it to light from one laser beam.
In the scotch tape laser burning and multi layer DVD examples, the laser merely burns holes on a 2D surface in many stacked surfaces. To read back you just focus the diode lasers' objective lens on whichever surface you want to read. This is considered inferior to the data densities possible with holography.
For a better explanation of how it works go here.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
But it's 500 feet tall!
"And like that