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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.
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 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.
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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.
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
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
But once get past this third dimension data storage and try to move into fourth dimension, time, data storage, then we will need time machines to access that data. You know that word document you saved that you were supposed to send to your boss but didn't? Well now, in order to get it back before you are fired, you have to travel back in time. Fourth dimensional storage is extremely far off, that is if time travel even is possible.
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.
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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.
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This is all well and good, but how many Libraries of Congress can this new technology hold? What is its bandwidth in LOC/s?
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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."
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 "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
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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.
...Since I submitted this a couple of days ago:
100+GB samples in 2003 Apparently they have prototype hardware working today.
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From http://www.howstuffworks.com/holographic-memory2.h tm
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Actually, write-only media is incredibly useful... look at the widespread implementation of /dev/null
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