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New Holographic Storage Medium Doesn't Shrink
Wiesel Werkstätte writes "Nature has an article reporting a new photopolymer suitable for long term holographic storage. previous materials are "read once" and they shrink and distort during the storage process. this new material, a combination of glass and plastic, can also be applied in thicker films." Which means that three-dimensional holographic storage is a tiny bit closer.
All this talk about mediums and shrinks has confused me... I don't know if I need to see a Psychic or a Psycologist.
Oh powerful and wise crystal tower, what is the average velocity of an unladen swallow?
I remember ten years ago reading about a crystal a cm or so on a side that was being used to hold enormous amounts of data holographically. Probably the LiNb they were talking about.
The problem of read-erase is easy to solve: use twice the amount of crystal and write one half with the bits you read from the other. It's still two orders of magnitude more bit-density than anything else. And it's not like there aren't a dozen other examples of dynamic RAM devices that needed some sort of refresh or constant cycling during access (bubble memory, bloch-line memory, mercury SAW memory, that thing the Canucks are doing storing data in the laser beams on their token ring...)
The demurrer about how to read materials with a laser? Please. CD, DVD, etc., etc. Throw in a micromirror array and a spindle, and you can do anything and watch TV on your wall.
Shrink, Schmink. If the reader system can't handle minor variations in process parameters, it was designed by monkeys. Or Ballmer. Same thing.
Nature kills me...they post a story about using multiple lasers to twiddle the orbitals in a supermaterial, and help you understand by reminding you (really, telling most of you for the first time) that varnish turns brown! Ya gotta love those mooks.
--Blair
"Has anyone ever actually seen a molecule of dihydrogen monoxide?"
This is a very interesting technology, and it seems like some type of three dimensional optical storage would enable a storage capacity one or twe magnitudes larger than the ones used today.
It is usually said that glass is a liquid, and flows slowly, as seen in old church windows that are thicker at the bottom edge.
However, a bit of googling seems to suggest that glass flowing over time is an urban legend (church windows apparently just had an imperfect manufacturing process, and were installed thick edge down). Whether to call glass a liquid or solid seems to be a toughter question.
But aside from flowing, is there something else about glass that could make it unsuitable for longtime information storage?
pinkNoise
Instead of "Not my fault, hard drive crashed", we will now hear "Our hologram shrunk, but they are working on it.." from our sysadmins.. :-)
Is it that bad? Random, high-speed might be a problem but sequential ought to be not that difficult. I'd imagine that the entire mechanism could be housed in something no larger than a typical housing used for external CDs.
Given the storage capacity relative to the size, even a mechanism as large as a typical mid-tower PC case capable of storing several TB of data would be useful. Remember, there were people who wet their pants over early WORM drives that were slow as hell.
I think the data "cube" conception is what gets people. IANA optical researcher, but why not a cylinder? I envision a cylinder spinning with two lasers mounted on the side at 90 deg angles to each other and another mounted something like a hard disk head on one end.
Will the storage unit "know" where its flaws are?
The currently-envisioned solution would be to pair each unit with another unit, termed the "girlfriend". The unit will then only need reference the girlfriend to find out exactly what flaws it has and how bad they are...
Just junk food for thought...
The expected storage density is around 10GBcm-, so it would be possible to pack aprox. 164GB of data in a cubic inch; Pretty good, tough current HD tecnology will probably reach that density before holo storage is ready for commercial use(of course, the 10GBcm- number will probably raise as research continues).
The really good thing about it is its speed: Laser beams can move without inertia, using acoustoptical materials which change its refraction angle acording to vibrations; That makes posible access times to a random point in no more than 100 microseconds, and data transmission rates around 1-2GBs-, which are several orders of magnitude faster than any HD that is even projected.
Glass is a liquid, physically speaking. however, this information really won't help answer the question at hand.
:)
I'm guessing that the optical properties of the storage medium could be affected over time, but $hit happens, and entropy increases.
All being said and done, considering the mean time to failure for current drives (what, 5yrs?), i can't imagine that slight distortion over hundreds of years will give anyone reason not so change over to mass storage with retrieval times comparable to RAM, and storage capacities orders of magnitudes higher than current drives.
i guess i'm say, that even if distortion occurs, it's probably kinder than a head crash
A: None. The Universe spins the bulb, and the Zen master merely stays out of the way.
CD = 1 dimentional data - did that (along with tape, vinyl and wax) a long time ago.
DVD = 2 dimentional data - a few years now.
H-Cube(TM) = 3 dimentional data...could be soon, but will happen.
...discounting time as a dimention...
This sig left unintentionally blank.
Having the storage is one thing, but AFAIK no-one has solved the optics problem as of yet. Having referent laser beams penetrate the storage medium at the multiple angles and speeds involved for useful data retrieval in a package suitable for long-term comsumer use is still an unsolved problem, is it not? So the creation of non-shrinking media is a good step forwards, but we're still a long way from opening our 'tray of what look like small ice-cubes and dropping one into [our] hi-fi system to provide the evening's soundtrack'. A long way indeed.... -drin
..a while ago, about cubes filled with proteins. Data would be stored on the proteins. Scientists had managed to store the data with relative ease, but couldn't retreive the data later on. This was 10GB per cubic cm. Holographic storage could mean that long awaited huge drop in hard drive prices and maybe even memory, depending on the read/write speed of it all. Imagine a rackmount file server storing terrabytes of data. mmmmmm... *drool* The perfect MP3 jukebox.
You've got mail. Pattern baldness. - Crow
But the old stuff was better! When you were done with it, you could color a nice picture on it and bake it. Just like shrinky-dinks!
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
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Glass is an amorphous solid.
See: Glass: Liquid or Solid -- Science vs. an Urban Legend
Cynic Mode:
Of course, with the way fair use and copyright laws are evolving, there won't be that much legal data accessible to anyone. Library of Congress? We'll be lucky if we can legally store a couple gigs of files in this thing without breaking some kind of law!
If the increasing opaqueness of the material is a hangup, I imagine that they will work with layers of the stuff, not thick pieces.
A "small cube" worth of material in a different form (smart card sized?) would still be pretty nifty.
Of course if you spread out the material, you introduce other problems, but they may be easier to solve.
I'll wait for CDDD (http://www.c-3d.net/) and their 140GB compact disk.
Rumor has it that they will be offering the first generation of their products in the next month or two. Plus it will work with the current drive technology (with a few mods) so that I don't have to buy another drive.
Carpe Scrotum - The only way to deal with your competition.
I could use some Holographic swim trunks that prevent shrinkage.
It may help boost his self confidence
I think they'd work in HERE products too.
Small flaws in the polymer coating or in the recordable layer (be they polymers (in the case of CD-R's) or sputtered metal films (in the case of CD-RW's)) will cause bit errors. How do they compensate for/know about the errors? Error correction placed into the stream written out to the disk. It'd be little to no different with holographic storage.
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