Slashdot Mirror
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.
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