One Terabyte On a 12-inch^H^H^H^Hcm Disk

News for nerds writes: "At InterOpto'02 - international optoelectronics exhibition hold in Chiba, Japan - OPTWARE Co.Ltd. made up of ex-Sony engineers, demoed(in Japanese) 1-terabyte super-high speed optical disk system "T-VRD." It uses hologram and stores 1 terabyte data in a 12-cm-CD-size disc, with 100Mbps - 1Gbps transfer rate. Available in 2003 as 19-inch rackmount, 2005 for PC." Update: 07/16 18:33 GMT by T : Sorry, that's centimeters, not inches, which is of course even better ;)

Comments

Holographic storage?

[Bonker]

Babelfish's rather loose translation:

From the past it is researched, applying the " hologram system ", the system which was developed. With hologram system of conventional type there was a problem in compatibility and the like of the existing media such as miniaturization and cost and DVD. With the technology which this time is announced, you say these weak points were overcome by using the same company individual " polarized light Cori near hologram technology " and so on.

Hologram technology until recently, using two object glasses, had the necessity to irradiate separate " reference beam " and " signal light ". You say with polarized light Cori near hologram technology these from one object glass the economical space, cost decrease is actualized by the fact that it makes lighting possible. In addition, we have assumed it can maintain also the compatibility of the DVD and the CD media.

I'm not sure if the translation is making it accurate or not, but it looks like this is indeed using holographic storage and not just holographic printing.

Re:point?

[AJWM]

No one needs a terabyte disk.

Talk to the computer vision people. MPEG and JPEG compession work in part by throwing out a lot of information that the human vision system won't miss. Applying current machine vision algorithms to such data doesn't work at all well due to compression artifacts.

Consider the latest digitally-produced Star Wars episode. If that were stored in uncompressed form, it'd take about three terabytes. (Assuming 2k by 3k frames, 24 fps, and two hour running time.)

Nice troll, though ;)

Re:point?

[cosmosis]

You're right about a Terabyte being just in time to hold ALL of our music, videos, and digital photo's, as well as everything else.

Here is what I can see for future increases in storage:

Petabyte: Store your entire DVD collection, CD collection, MP3 collection, all of your digital photo's from a lifetime, books, documents, etc.

Exabyte (1 million Terabytes): This amount of storage will be useful if you want to record in hig-quality digital video all of yor life from your wearable computer that you take everywhere. You will be abel to access every moment of your life, every conversation and play it back at anytime. The type of memory would also come in handy for storing large, highly detailed Virtual Worlds of your own creation. This is exactly where I see 100GHz machines coming in handy - the ability to render realistic virtual worlds on the fly.