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.

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.

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.

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.