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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."
Digging into the article, I get this:
Holography stores data by using multiple light beams to create chemical reactions.
To me, this seems not so different to the normal cd/dvd burning process.
Shine light until you leave a mark, move one.
This does not seem to be holographic in the sense we are expecting.
liqbase
I know people who could use this today. What would you rather have, a warehouse full of mag tapes, or a handful of holographic disks on a bookshelf?
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I don't know what methods this uses, but my money is on the colinear Optware system. It is very simple in theory, and will
provide very high bandwidth. (since it writes 52 bits at a time...) The 20MB/s transfer rate that Inphase lists is very unimpressive when considering discs 1TB in size.
See http://www.optware.co.jp/english/top.htm for more info.
We've been reading about holographic storage systems that are due out any time now for the last 15 years... gives us a call when (at very least) a respected review organization has gotten its hands on a prototype. Then at least we can have a wee bit of validation.
Until then, blow your stock/VC-pumping hype out of your asses.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
But tapes don't have a random access time around 200 milliseconds ;). If u aren't just doing backups, but archival for regulary needed data, this might be well a difference :).
Actually, I watched this technology for some time... 8 years ago, a Russian company claimed to have the same thing, labelled FM-ROM.
Waited and waited... dunno if it was all just a scam, or perhaps this company is the new incarnation. C3D's stock went into OTC/Penny-stock status and changed symbols countless times.
I would most likely like a warehouse full of mag tapes. If one of these discs goes bad, you've lost 300 GB of data. If a tape goes bad, you've lost quite a bit less. Unless you're using 300 GB tapes, which do exist.
Tapes are used because we know they are reliable. Optical data seems to have problems with being reliable. When you can't afford to lose the backup information, you will use the tried and tested technology, instead of the new whiz-bang technology.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I vaguely recall hearing years ago about how holographic storage was being developed in the form of cubes or something. I presume it meant being able to store information in three dimensions rather than on a two-dimensional flat surface somehow, without any moving parts. I can also recall that optical processors were being developed that used light rather than electricity, which allegedly would have made them much faster. I've always thought that technology was going to develop to the point that computers could eventually be entirely optical, with optical processors and holographic storage - with no moving parts or electricity for those parts of the computer, except perhaps for the light source.
See, the problem with optical is that because it is removeable media, the format is stuck in time. First, there is the vaporware period where an optical drive is announced. Favorable comparisons are made to hard drives available during the vaporware period. Then the optical drives are actually released, and the capacity is about the same as hard drives of the day -- but, hey, it's removeable (thus the niche applications I referred to). Then the optical drives can't incrementally upgrade capacity (manufacturers wait until a full doubling of capacity before making their customers upgrade), and the optical drives lag in capacity.
IIRC, holographic media has long been heralded as the future of storage, not for space reasons so much as the fact that holograms degrade gracefully. That is, if you take a holographic plate and scratch it, you don't eliminate information (the image) where the scratch is, you degrade the quality of the information across the whole image in proportion to the area of the scratch over the area of the entire hologram (which should be very small).
This makes sense because if you take a hologram (play with a key fob if you have one, this is inherently true of holograms) and cover half the image, you can still rotate the uncovered half in a way that allows you to see the remainder of the hologram, so you haven't deleted that sector of information--however, the resolution is half what it would be otherwise. In this way, small amounts of damage are undetectable, and don't result in errors until the "resolution" of the bits drops low enough that they can't be read.
So, my understanding was that in digital media, bits aren't stored in discrete positions, but the information for each bit is spread across the entirety of the medium, and thus the media would be much more resistant to damage. However, for such an amazing benefit, I don't see any mention of this, so maybe this works on a different principle--does anybody else know about this?
They first get people interested in the 'low density' variant
But CAN they do that at the 300GB capacity point?
I can go out TODAY and build a RAID of mirrored 300GB winchester disks for about $500. What incentive do I have to wait around until next year for a non-rewritable storage format that will undoubtedly cost more and be more susceptible to errors?