Slashdot Mirror
Holographic Storage Overview at CNET
encebollado writes: "CNET has an article about how holography is being used to create next generation storage devices. The researchers promise they'll beat out DVD by an order of magnitude." Actually, it's an overview with four separate articles -- no bets on when the technology covered will really be available though.
That I'm the first post? Nope. Stupid lameness filter.
:-D
And always remember, "Fist" can be a verb
"Dancing is the vertical expression of a horizontal desire" --Robert Frost
I think I heard news about this being developed at some major university back in '99. Sound familiar to anyone else?
# fuser -v
#
"The capacity of DVDs will eventually be exhausted, but when exactly that will happen is still a big question"
It's happening right now if you want a HD-DVD.
I don't care so much about holographic storage as I do about holodecks. When are those babies coming out? I'll make myself a Counselor Troi simulator and... oh baby!
Have you been stalked by Seth today?
A lot of people are probably asking why we don't have this technology yet.
... I doubt it'll happen before then.
One possible answer is because of the sensitivity of holographic equipment to vibrations. A hologram encodes phase differences between laser beams. Errors in the phase encoding mean errors in the data retrieval - you get a blurry or disjoint hologram, or you lose your data.
Light is in the hundreds of nanometers range of wavelength. This means a vibration in the equipment (a movement of one part relative to another) of only a tenth of a micron can completely throw the phase encoding out of alignment. Imagine a tape deck whose heads needed positioning to submicron precision.
Making holographic images is therefore rather difficult if, say, a large lorry rolls past your window. A hard-drive with the same problem would be absolutely useless.
So until a suitably hard substrate can be found on which to engineer this equipment, it's only a pipedream. Maybe nanotechnology will create such a material
I am SO SICK of hearing about this damn holographic storage. It has been polluting print media with wild-eyed hype since the days before Internet. I remember reading about this very thing back when Winchester was shipping 32MB 5.25" hard disks.
"Two to five years away" my ass.
Call me when it's in stock. Maybe Duke Nukem Forever can ship on Holographic crystals.
i dont see why this is a surprise to anyone. it is plainly obvious that there is only so much data that can be stored on a two-dimensional device. i, personally, think that if it weren't for the inhibitants of ancient (5-10 year old) technology, this form of storage would have manifested itself much sooner. i mean, think about it. the early forms of data storage were pretty one dimensional. your data could be a magnetic blip on a reel that was spinning in one direction. to get back to it, you had to spin all the way back to the real. next came floppy disks which added another dimensions. true, to get back to your data, you have to spin the disk completely around again, but at least you can use cylinders to add more storage space. three dimensions comes rather naturally along that pattern. what's next? obviously, time-coded storage - the fourth dimension.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, go into business for themselves.
I think I heard news about this being developed at some major university back in '99.
hmmm... I think you would be safe using this statement for a *very* large percentage of the stories.
Best Windows Freeware
Every hologram storage unit will come with a demo Professor Moriarty simulation that will commandeer your computer until you discover a way to beam him out.
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
IBM sold much of their magnetic HDD to Hitachi. Maybe they made a breakthrough in holographic storage that makes it cheap enough to become mainstream.
Id rather have holographic WOMEN than holographic STORAGE.
In college, really poor, need a flatscreen.
n/m
After selling VA stock (LNUX), Mexico is the only place one could afford.
Actually, it's an overview with four separate articles...
It's interesting to note that articles about holography can be broken/cut into multiple pieces, and each piece will retain a full and exact copy of the original article.
~jeff
How do we know if its really there?
Great Linux Site
The first post trolls are just so excited about this technology that they cannot control themselves. After all, the thought of being able to have 100GB of goatse-like pr0n in an easy-to-carry storage medium has been a dream of theirs for oh so many years, and now it is finally on it's way to being here.
interresting timeline
- IBM has lot's of hard-disk related technologies patented
- IBM has a relativly flourishing HD business
- IBM sells said HD activities (except R&D)
- IBM breaks storage records in lab with new technology
=> I'm betting IBM will come out with a new kick-ass storage technologie shitin the next 5 years
Will already beat DVD media by an order of magnitude approximately.
Holographic 3d optical storage has been being promised as a future tech for a decade at least.
For now, what i'd rather is a new optical format that stored 50-100GB on a polycarbonate disc, writeable in 1-2 hours or less. The technology is there already, just got to get standards people to agree to the little details.
Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random numbers is, of course, in a state of sin.-John von Neumann
Holographic memory is not a simple metter of more bits per cm^2 or whatever. It's a different kind of memory, where every part stores the whole picture, i.e. when you break such memory into two halfs, every part still has the entire content, only with lower quality. Also, there are no fixed limits on how much information you can store on hologram — you can always store something more, which will lower the quality of the rest of stored information, but you won't hit any fixed maximum number of bits, like with standard types of memory. Saying that it "[beats] out DVD by an order of magnitude" is totally ignoring the most fundamental features of holographic memory.
Krótko: kady Erotomek
W pimiennictwie ma swój domek.
The problem with the technology as it 'exists' right now is that you can't create master originals, and create thousands of copies from a master. From the article "This means that they can't be used for mass distribution of consumer content"
With this limitation, an important consideration becomes how do I get my data onto the medium? For example, assuming you have 500 gigabytes of data (pr0n,mp3s...) , how long will it take to put on these disks? The speed bottleneck becomes the computers ability to process the data, not the storage device itself.
.....
clearly, you are missing the concept..ah well
Those who can, do. Those who can't, go into business for themselves.
That usually means, "Their is no way in hell you can afford this." :)
"On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero."
Like a recurring infection, the "holographic storage" demo gets trotted out to the media every three to five years. Every time, the press breathlessly regurgitates claims of unbelievably storage capacities. Every time, IBM claims that it's "a few years away from shipping" the technology. And every last time, it never happens.
I first remember seeing IBM say that they were "a few years" away from a working implementation in Byte magazine...in 1983.
This isn't so much a vaporware story as it is the vaporware story of our generation. Expect Xanadu, Duke Nukem Forever and Debian/Hurd to ship decades before you ever see functional holographic storage in the consumer market.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
This is all well and good, but how many Libraries of Congress can this new technology hold? What is its bandwidth in LOC/s?
qslack.com
Think I'm gonna roll around in my latest million dollars I made so far this year once again :)
How is your economy open source programmers?
So, we're one step closer to those cool data crystals in B5. I sure would love to carry around everything in a rockin my pocket...
Actually, I -believe- that a number of years back, IBM's R&D portion of their HDD company (now being sold off), did research into a sort of HDD that was a 3D cube. They would shoot a set of lasers into the gelatin-like cube, (yeah, yeah..a gelatinous cube), and where the two lasers met, they would leave a point of data.
A 1-inch by 1-inch by 1-inch cube could hold 4 Tb. The biggest problem, of course, was that the gelatinous cube they were using was just a write-once sort of thing. They didn't have a medium they could re-write on.
Awk! Pieces of eight. Pieces of eight. Pieces of seven... ERROR: General Protection Fault. [Paroty Error.]
...when all these technologies hit the consumer. Just think what will be available on ftp/web/file servers, for the agerage user! Imagine logging onto gnutella servers and seeing that the average host has a terabyte of media shared? The possibilities are absolutely astounding... but admittedly they're being announced far too often. Why lure the consumer into their pipe dream and get their hopes up? I know that these technologies are in fact real, but come on! How long will it actually take before Dell starts shipping these storage devices instead of IDE/SCSI drives? 2 years? 3years? 4 or more?
I'm all for this foray into the what-if scenario's, but there has to be a limit! Please someone wake me up when they are available at Future Shop!
dmarien
Blu-Ray already beats out DVD by over half an order of magnitude.
--Blair
"Tomorrow: we already have flying cars, we just don't know where the 'Deploy Control Surfaces' button is."
We hear about this crap every week. It will NEVER come out. People have had this technology since 1992 and HDs will always stay around. Nothing will replace them or DVDs.. hell DVDs still arent even standard yet. Where is IBMs HDs that are made out of atoms that can hold 1 terrabytes on something the size of a penny? We heard about this around 3 years ago, is it out? Nope. Will it ever be? Nope. People need to stop with these mundane useless stories. Until it is sittng on the shelves at Best Buy it doesnt need to be posted here. /rant off
..when is this company going to sell to the public
http://www.c-3d.net
From one of the four articles..
"Existing storage technologies are starting to reach the point where they can no longer advance," says Skip Kilsdonk, the InPhase vice president of business development.
They were saying the same thing 10 years ago about SISC chips and probably IDE hard drives. I think blanket statements like this are dangerous. Never underestimate the power of innovation (or luck)!
Also, there are no fixed limits on how much information you can store on hologram - you can always store something more, which will lower the quality of the rest of stored information, but you won't hit any fixed maximum number of bits, like with standard types of memory. Saying that it "[beats] out DVD by an order of magnitude" is totally ignoring the most fundamental features of holographic memory.
/dev/null to store data and /dev/random to retrieve it and claim as much space as I want.
The problem is, if I don't care about the quality of the data retrieved, I could use
If you need to get your data back intact - i.e. with enough fidelity for you to rebuild the original data without loss - there turns out to be a hard limit to how much you can store with a holographic storage medium. The exact limit varies based on the geometry of the setup and of the holographic medium, but can be calculated. You can also measure it directly for any real system, which is presumably what the company involved did when citing storage densities for its prototype.
So, while the accessing method is very different, the storage limit for holograms scales in the same way as storage limits for other types of device (in this case, with the volume of the holographic film IIRC).
The researchers promise they'll beat out DVD by an order of magnitude.
An order of magnitude in a binary system? hexa? octa? unary?
The "InPhase plan" page says
Likewise, the company says its research shows that the media can be used in a rewritable format but won't discuss specifics for anything but its write-only product.
They must have meant "write once" or "read only". A disk you can write to but not read from would be less useful, eh?
Rocky J. Squirrel
There is a pretty nice article over at How Stuff Works with a breif explanation of the history and workings of Holographic Storage Devices
I work for Tilc heavy industries and whatever I say here is not endosed by our corporation.
:> The military,government and archives are our first customers, we also have strong interest from world libraries and other such entities. IBM might go into production of Silica 48E at their Phillipines plant staring Q3 04.
We have been researching into holographic storage since way back in 94. Dr. Erwin Gupta, our senior researcher is known for his work on such storage (AFAIK he was one of the main proponats of DivX (hehehe)).
We are using Silica 48E in crystalline format to form a 3D latics that can store and information. Now for the nice part, our sturcute XI can (3 cm - 2 cm - 2 cm ) can store informations in the magniature of 78TB. Information retrival is only hapmpered by speed of axuliary pheripherials. But our test machines are now running with optical conntections to the cube, and thus storage and retrival is trivial.
The only problem we have is, how to format such huge quantities of information. By format I mean, how to place it in a viable layout. I feel this is one area where we have constantly lacked. In the past we've been using standard methods of storage (Unix filesystem type layout and b-tree, cMax cube), but this lead to storage being shrunk down by a magnitude of 15. For information that is stored in bulk (eg: Large archives that are interlaced raw, this is not an issue).
Our partner, IBM has also been very interested in the Silica 48E strucute, they are also going into research with us and I felt this was one of the reason for the closure of their HD shops (since they've felt the limit of HD's being reached and thus they are moving to better media).
Silica 48E can be mass produced cheaply, the storage opens to almost limitless quantities (Oopes.. Sorry If I'm doing a Gates 64k again). Currently we are stress testing the crystals and we have put the entire library of congress (Storage A-F (Pre 94)) in 2 crystals with an induced Cmax filesystem. Retrival is an issue here, cause such a large archive needs better tools (ours is only hardware).
I dont see crystals going into consumer use in the near future, give it 5-8 years and you'd probably seem them at the high end. Given that, it's cheaper to produce on Silica 48E cube than make 3 DVD's
has been looked at an given up. IBM does
still does some research but is focusing on 2D
are AFM contact.
3D Holographic storage has been the passion and
the industry force behind 3D Volume Holographic
Optical Storage Press/industry interest.
For comparison of all media storage types.
background on storage technologies and what's
the latest go to Colossal Storage Corp.
the world leader on 3D Volume Holographic Optical
Storage NanoTechnology Research and development
for 16 years !!
http://colossalstorage.net/colossal.htm
....and bear in mind I'm thinking in terms of holographic projections and not holographic encoded media (if there is such a thing)...what happens to the data when the power goes out and the lasers cut off?
They must have meant "write once" or "read only". A disk you can write to but not read from would be less useful, eh?
I'd have thought it's good for /dev/null
Sorry for not getting all the details right, but my copy is at home...The june issue of IEEE Computer magazine has a short article about a company that has developed a Holographic DVD storage unit that I found to be quite interesting.
It stores about 100 GB worth of data, so in that regards it puts the standard DVD to shame, but at the same time its access time is 1.5 or so times as fast as standard DVD due to the parallelism inherent in the storage mechanism.
While I am fascinated in this technology I visited the Colossal site. Unfortunately, I was so distracted by the poor quality of the site, I could not bare to remain on the site.
They ought to be talking to George Lucas today," Miller said, for no apparent reason whatsoever.
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
The real problem with holographic technology is that it is the next generation of storage medium.
As such it will constantly be just over the horizion.
Stick some project managers on the press releases, have them assign milestones and targeted deadlines.
That way we can claim that it's only 3 years overdue.
Hmmmmmm, seems to me we arent really thinking in the dimentions available. Cant they come up with something NEW!
Between Blue Laser and Holographic technology, one thing is definitely going to be part of any new storage technologies is DIGITAL RIGHTS MANAGEMENT UP THE YING-YANG. This new storage system will have so many copy locks you are going to want to get out the bagels and cream cheese. The RIAA and the MPAA will not let this new technology out the door until and unless it is 100% locked down.
You will NOT be able to store your Warez collection in these new formats. You will not be able to create an MP3 collection to die for. You will prolly be able to store your pr0n provided it doesn't have digital watermarks all over it identifying that it's property of Playboy, Penthouse, Hustler, Screw or whatever.
This is going to be the huge carrot the MPAA and the RIAA dangle over our heads to make us accept their draconian content control measures. "Want this spiffy new storage format? You're gonna have to accept Big Brother along for the ride too."
It's tragic...I would be excited about all this. Blue Laser technology in particular is a great step forward. But we will pay dearly for this step forward in loss of freedom to use content as we see fit. [sigh]
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
I'd wager a reason videophone has never reached any kind of widespread acceptance is that getting decent video over a POTS line isn't happening.
Which kind of makes me wonder why the phone company doesn't push ISDN for residential phone services more aggressively (like subsidizing basic ISDN-compatible phones).
Widespread adoption of ISDN for phones *would* enable a pretty decent adoption of videophones as the bandwidth and latency to support reasonable video would be there.
Hey!!! Nice double karma grab man! Post something with misspelling, and then dis yourself to get the funny points on top of your original post. Ingenious!!!
;)
I'll have something intelligent to add one of these days...
My magnetic storage and magnetic women. Too bad I'm polarized the same as women.... damn physics.
...Since I submitted this a couple of days ago:
100+GB samples in 2003 Apparently they have prototype hardware working today.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
I already have a petabyte capable /dev/null.
"no bets on when the technology covered will really be available though"
Didn't you know? Its five years away, of course.
Just like everything else...
// harborpirate
// Slashbots off the starboard bow!
From http://www.howstuffworks.com/holographic-memory2.h tm
I think I have more chance of being fellated by Madonna, the Queen, or your wife...
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
but the limit of 'only so much data' is not visible. Read the previous story of blue laser mini-CD's that hold 27GB. those are not holographic yet they are quite a jump over old-tech red laser cd-rom's. The fact that 3-d holography seems to be an obvious step leads me to believe that it will be the last thing that will work... :)
Write-only media have their problems. But security isn't one of them.
Actually, write-only media is incredibly useful... look at the widespread implementation of /dev/null
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
Im holding out for what Opticom will come out with. They have been developing this for the last 6-7 years and is close to a product that can be released. With Intel involved into this - who can say what its going to end up as...
A quote from their page:
The equivalent of 400,000 CDs, or 60,000 DVDs, or 126 years of MPG music may be stored on a polymer memory chip the size of a credit card.
Thats a completely organic, non-volatile, fast, solid-state, scaleable and CHEAP memory. If that amount can fit on a credit-card, its not a long leap to imagine haveing your own personal mirror of the entire internet in a cigatette-size box!
http://www.thinfilm.se/html/technology.htm