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InPhase Announces 300GB Holographic Discs
turboflux writes "After rolling out prototype holographic drives last year, ExtremeTech reports that InPhase has announced they intend to ship drives to commercial customers in 2006. InPhase originally intended on shipping the 200GB version of their media this year. Another article on Engadget mentions that 1TB discs will be available in 2009."
Maybe you didn't read the article properly? The linked article states that "the recording material is 1.5 mm thick and is sandwiched between two 130 mm diameter transmissive plastic substrates". So from my take on this, it seems that they have a plate-like object (possibly see-thru... I can imagine GREAT case-modding...) that is VERY THIN. I could even imagine that perhaps several of these could eventually be sandwiched together into a sort of cube to create massive amounts of storage. You would have several thin read/write "heads" that would read the "plates" on each side of them. They say the timeframe for R/W media is 2-3 years. Exciting!
Ads? What ads?
that seems kind low
That is because
Second-generation rewriteable products are due in 2007 or 2008, Murphy said
Releasing 1.5 TB disks would satisfy the storage market immediately. They first get people interested in the 'low density' variant, then those people will become greedy again for the higher density versions in 2007 or 2008.
Stachel
It's sort of the same, but then again not really. From InPhase's website:
Light from a single laser beam is split into two beams, the signal beam (which carries the data) and the reference beam. The hologram is formed where these two beams intersect in the recording medium.
The process for encoding data onto the signal beam is accomplished by a device called a spatial light modulator (SLM). The SLM translates the electronic data of 0's and 1's into an optical "checkerboard" pattern of light and dark pixels. The data is arranged in an array or page of around a million bits. The exact number of bits is determined by the pixel count of the SLM.
At the point of intersection of the reference beam and the data carrying signal beam, the hologram is recorded in the light sensitive storage medium. A chemical reaction occurs in the medium when the bright elements of the signal beam intersect the reference beam, causing the hologram stored. By varying the reference beam angle, wavelength, or media position many different holograms can be recorded in the same volume of material.
LTO has been doing 400gb tape (40MB/sec) for some time now.
This product seems to be about 5 years too late to market.
"This does not seem to be holographic in the sense we are expecting."
What sense were you expecting? A normal holographic image does precisely that, chemical reactions induced by light, it's the same basic principle as normal photography. The difference is that you use lasers (coherent phase background), and increase resolution to the point that you can store not just amplitude but relative phase information of the wavefront.
The full wave front of light, including the relative phase is sufficient to recreate the entire wave, including all "3D information". This is known in physics as Huygen's Principle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huygens_principle
No, *you* got it wrong. They do not state the transfer rate anywhere in the article. They never say that the "one million bits at a time" is "per second". They are simply saying that the mechanism can read 1 million bits at the same time in a single operation, in the same way that a digitial camera CCD "reads" 5 megapixels worth of data at the same time (it uses similar technology to read the holographic information).
The article states that the "200-GB drive, the HDS-200R, would ship this year with a 20-Mbyte transfer rate". I assume the transfer rate will be roughly the same on the 300GB drive and not miracously increase to 1GB per second just because of a minor upgrade in data density.
If the capacity is kind of "low" by holographic memory standards, it might be because this medium doesn't use any other kind of multiplexing beside spatial multiplexing.
Basically, what we have here is a disc with several "holographic bits", scattered across the disc just like a regular compact disc. The main difference here is that when you read an holographic bit with the reconstruction beam, you get a full page of data (here, a 1024x1024 image - hence 1 Mbit).
What is interesting with holographic memory is that when you use thick layers of holographic materials you can also multiplex the data using the angle of the reconstruction beam, or its wavelength. That means that you can hit the same area on the disc with the reconstruction beam at a different angle, and get a different page of data. Or use a different laser beam, and get again another page of data.
Of course, this process seriously complexifies the hardware that must be used to read an hoographic medium, but it is the key to reach tremendous densities with the holographic technique.
What is interesting here is that FillFactory designs CMOS-APS detectors instead of the more traditional CCD imagers.
APS stands for Active Pixel Sensor: basically the main difference with CCD's is that you get the line and row selection transistors, and an amplification transistor built in every pixel. That means you don't have to transfer the charge from pixel to pixel over the whole matrix as in CCDs: you can directly address the detector matrix as you would do on RAM.
The main drawback is that these selection and amplification units take room on the silicium, and therefore prevent the whole surface of a pixel to be sensitive to light. This is what is called the fill factor : the amount of a pixel which is effectively capturing light.
FillFactory (now owned by Cypress Semiconductors) have promising patents related to increasing the fill factor - hence their name.
160kbps? Yeah, and I download them on KaZaA too...
EAC and --alt-preset extreme all the way. I don't listen to no steenkin 160kbps mp3s.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
um, no. You'd still have a hologram showing a gallon-sized bottle, it would simply have half the resolution as before. The refraction of the light doesn't suddenly change simply because the plate broke - think about it for a moment. Does it make sense to you that if you break the plate, the light would get displaced to a porportionally smaller area, that the outline of the bottle would shift inward? No. It merely loses clarity.
For WORM applications, this is not that big a deal. However, for R/W applications, some serious file system and virtual memory redesign is needed.
Not to worry - these holo drives wear out quickly with repeated rewriting just like CD-RW, so they are not providing paging space anytime soon. But it is fun to think about.
It's high compared to hard drives, but compared to other optical disc drives, it's in the same range. The fastest CD / DVD drives have ~100ms access times.
And, keep in mind that access times on early CD / DVD drives were WORSE than the time advertised by this new media. As rotational speeds, caches and access algorithms improved, so did access times. Expect the same from this stuff.
But I see one roadblock: there's no severe need for a new large-capacity optical media. CD-ROM adoption was a given, as there was nothing quite like it for software distribution: cheaper than a floppy to make in quantity, and had plenty of growth room in a day when games were forced to ship on 5-10 floppies, not to mention dozens of floppies for office suite or OS installs.
Plus, you had game designers just itching to add space-hungry features like vocal tracks, video and higher-resolution, higher-variety artwork. Microsoft helped the whole thing gain momentum by pushing through the MMPC standard, which pretty much standardized sound and CD-ROM support.
Now, look to today. We have games like UT2004 and HL2 still shipping mostly on six CDs, with only limited or more expensive runs available on DVD. This, despite the fact that the DVD-ROM drive is seven years old, and that DVD+/-R gave DVD-ROM a killer app starting three years ago.
The fact is, there is not much perceived need for greater capacity on a single disc. DVD will never completely replace CD-ROM on the PC, simply because they're more expensive to make, the capacity is not always needed, and every DVD drive made from now until the end of time will support the old CD-ROM standard.
Thus, you see a slowdown in the push for larger removable optical media, because there's already a standard that's 99.9% compatible and good enough for 95% of uses. It may take another five years for DVD to become the dominant removable media, and another 5 years for us to push the limits of it. Holographic media is going to have to bide it's time, or be prepared for initial disappointment.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
Could take a long time to write one of these suckers to capacity though:
The HDS-200R, would ship this year with a 20-Mbyte transfer rate
OK, so 200GB=200,000MB.
200,000MB / 20MB/sec = 10000 sec 10000 sec / 3600sec/hour = 2.8h (2h48m approx).
Not a bad speed considering that my first DVD-writer took about 15 minutes to write a disc... but still a long time if you're making a live backup, etc.