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."

Comments

300gb?

[thegoogler]

i dont know about you.. but uhh.. that seems kind low, especially from previous estimates/articles.

at least at this point, its looking like its actually worse than normal magnetic drives, i mean i expected intial drives to be at least 1.5tb

Re:300gb?

[samael]

That, sadly, is the way things tend to go with tech. You get the initial announcement that new technology X is a billion times better than old technology Y, and will be ready Real Soon Now.

Closer examination shows that Real Soon Now is, in fact, in about 5 years, by which point old technology Y has nearly caught up with new technology X. In addition the new technology has turned out to not be able to go into production quickly at its theoretical limits, but has to start out an order of magnitude slower/smaller.

There's frequently then a switchover, with the new technology having more space to improve than the old one, but there tends not to be a sudden huge leap from 5MB hard drives to 50GB hard drives - there's almost always lots of little steps in between.

Re:300gb?

[rxmd]

at least at this point, its looking like its actually worse than normal magnetic drives

Two words: removable media.

This is not a hard drive replacement. Instead, it's for all those of you who don't know how to do backups from their 160GB harddrives without a DLT streamer or similar stuff.

Re:300gb?

[springbox]

You should probably consider other aspects of this type of storage like.. Is it more reliable than current hard drives? Is it faster? Capacity should come after those two in my opinion. It probably won't take them very long to increase the size of this device after they release their first version anyway.

Re:300gb?

[ABaumann]

The access time is pretty much the only good feature in these things. If I were to store regularly needed data, I'd prolly just use a Firewire 800 external drive. It's not disk-based like the holo drives, but Lacie already makes them in 1.5 terabyte sizes. They're almost 4 times faster (28MB/s vs 100MB/s) at read/write then the holographic drives, and they're considerably smaller, and prolly apt to be far cheaper. The only area that holographic drives would come in handy is when you need extremely large data sizes. 1 terabyte is gonna be pretty hard to fill up, and considering that this thing will take up about as much space as 2 or 3 Lacie drives, we're looking at something capable of storing 5 TB before it's at all worth it.

Re:300gb?

[SatanicPuppy]

Tape sucks. If I never have to haggle with another tempermental tape backup, I'll be a happy puppy.

Whether this will be my long-wished for tape killer will depend on the cost of the media, and how long it can be stored before it starts to degrade.

HDTV / UHDV

[valkoinen]

This could be the storage media for delivering HDTV content with extreme bitrates. Maybe not quite http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra_High_Definition _VideoUHDV quality but hell of a lot better than even the largest blu-ray discs.

Maybe digital movie theaters could use this to transfer and/or store the movies?

Re:O... kay...

[mccalli]

There are two kinds of people, either people with very low LAN connections and people who need a backup of their porn. Not much else use.

Nonsense. I have immediate use for at least that much storage, for example. Lossless music storage, ripping of DVDs (I use an eyeHome for streaming to TV), offloaded Tivo recordings, full dumps of DV tapes from my camcorder for later editing - not a torrent or pr0n stash to be had.

There's plenty of legitimate uses for large amounts of storage. Most revolve around AV it's true, but that AV needn't be swiped stuff from dodgy torrents or half of every posting ever to alt.binaries.redheads...

Cheers,
Ian

Re:'One million bits at a time'

[doublebackslash]

No, you got it wrong, in stead of each read being 1 bit, each is one megabit. This makes for roughly 1GB (byte) or more per second.

Re:'One million bits at a time'

[Anonymous Coward]

Huh? How does "one million bits at a time" translate to "one megabit transfer rate"?

They never mentioned time. You don't know how long those million bits take to write.

To paraphase dilber, you are suffering from total logic disconnect ("I enjoy pasta because my house is made from bricks") with a touch or insanity ("I got my facts from a talking tree"). uoY diputs niatskcuf. todhsalS srotaredom era lla .sretfoop

Belgian chips...

[spectrokid]

InPhase technology uses a camera chip designed by FillFactory, a Belgian chip maker.
Now if you are British, you are probably thinking of this.

Re:O... kay...

[beset]

I second this.

I've 2 x 300gb drives in raid 1 (mirroring), i had to raid them after my previous 200gb drive failed and i had no backup (you try backing up 200gb cheaply) losing months of video work. Raid 1 is hardly great for throughput, especially when working on very large files (i now copy everything over to a spare 15k scsi drive to work with)

A WORM system that's similar in size to tape but costs a lot less is a very attractive product to me.

As usual

[michaelmalak]

Optical storage capacities have always lagged hard drive capacities and have always had, of course, much slower access times. This relegates optical to niche applications that absolutely need the removeability aspect for storage for either archival (especially of space-hungry data such as lossless imaging) or security purposes. Examples include periodic ultrasound imaging of nuclear reactor components and, of course, medical applications. This announcement just continues the trend.

Re:As usual

[AvitarX]

Really?

I seem to remember early CD-ROMS being bigger then the HDs that came with the computers.

I know I had Grollier encyclopedia on my computer with a 500MB hard drive, and I was not first to get a CD-ROM either.

At school I think our Amiga with a CD-ROM had a smaller drive then the CDs.

I don't know I just have a very different memmory of CDs early on, this sense of wow, thats a lot of space. Part of it might have been they were 400 times larger then the floppies they replaced for program distribution though. A jump like that would be equivelent to 3.6 TB (9GB DVD), which they are not even talking about.

These things would have to be real cheap to be worht it, with 500 GB exernal drives offering better performance and being available now.

Re:Greater Throughput

[Vo0k]

1) New Technology. Think speed/volume ratio not quite far below 1x CD-ROM. Where will it be in 5-10 years, if the drive enters mainstream?
2) If that's WORM, 300G of fixed drive is useless. 300G of replaceable medium is great. Think situation from early days of CD-ROM again.
3) If you need to move bulk amounts of data, fast, 20M/s is slow. If you want to USE the data even not directly, like watching a movie, just processing it with the machine, like searching database or decrypting data on the fly, 20M/s is quite a lot and requires very decent CPU power.

Transfer Speeds

[Locarius]

Am I the only one who thinks that perhaps instead of pushing for greater capacity it is time to develop FASTER storage solutions? Yes, its nice to have a ton of storage, and there is (somewhat expensive) solutions already for those who need it, but if you want a FAST storage system you are pretty much stuck. Just as an afterthought, if (for some reason) I had a fast optical connection to a site I could theoretically transfer files to my PC faster than I could write to my disk.

Removable storage is lagging.

[GiMP]

I remember these things called CD-ROMS from the early 90's. They had a whooping 650 megabytes compared to the 256-500 megabyte harddrives at the time. Can you imagine it? Harddrives being *smaller* than the removable media? Sure, it wasn't writable by end-users, but it was at least available in read-only form.

In the late 90's all the harddisk manufacturers scrambled to build the biggest and fastest disks. Unfortunately, our removable media has fallen behind. I'm sorry, but the maximum DVD size is what? 15.9 gb -- if we use both sides of the medium. This just isn't enough when there are portable music players sporting 80gb harddrives.

Re:Removable storage is lagging.

[Mant]

In some ways it is easy to make a bigger hard drive, or at least once you have made it, get people to use it. They just install and off they go.

Removable media suffers from the problem it isn't much use unless a lot of people use it. People aren't going to switch to slightly better media, requiring buying new recorders/players, suffering from the stuff you record not being compatible with most people's players for a while and so on. Removable storage will always lag because of this.

So while we can make removable media much better than current DVDs, they aren't better enough yet to get people to switch. Floppy disks to CDs to DVDs were all big jumps in storage, and now DVDs are big enough for most people, most of the time.

Re:Removable storage is lagging.

[sjames]

Harddrives being *smaller* than the removable media?

That has lead to the crazy situation we have now where removable IDE drives are the most affordable back-up media that will actually be used. Although they have none of the archival properties desired for a backup, it's STILL cheaper to make two copies of the backup onto two IDEs than it is to mess with a DVD jukebox. While manually swapping DVDs would be cheaper still, and might improve archival characteristics, the odds are that a procedure involving swapping a dozen DVD's around just before quitting time will simply not happen on some days.

I can understand that there are good technical reasons for this state of affairs. Storage density requires precision. It's a lot easier to get the needed precision when the read/write heads and media are perminantly attached to the same structure.

That, and compared to the size of a bit on a high density medium, a scratch or a dust speck is HUGE. HDs have the advantage that the media and heads live in a sealed clean environment. Imagine if you wiped the platters on your shirt, called it good enough, and tossed them into a drive.

Carriers with a sliding access door help, but are still nowhere near as clean as a sealed unit.

Re:300gb? keep in mind the purpose

[dingDaShan]

The purpose of this media is to make money. Obviously they can make much more money by making a simplified version at first that has more space than all but the largest hard discs, and then space the release of larger versions. This model is used to make more money... which is the purpose of any commercial venture.

Re:O... kay...

[Anonymous Coward]

This technology has the potential to vastly outstrip the storage capacity of magnetic media. Even if there are tapes that can match it now, it seems likely they won't keep up with it forever. Any reliability problems can be solved by using error correcting codes. It's just a matter of sacrificing some storage capacity for redundancy so that the probability of an error after a given length of time is sufficiently small. If the data densities this technology is supposed to be capable of are achieved then using up more storage space for redundancy shouldn't be an issue.

Scratches?

[Spy der Mann]

I'm curious - how sensitive are these discs to scratches that could corrupt their information? In other words, what's their reliability? (No I didn't RTFA, sorry)