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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."
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
Who wants that amount of discspace in their hands?
:(
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.
Imagine travelling with it:
"Oh jeez, Jimmy, you dropped the Holographic Disc! Now dad lost all his files."
Pity for dad.
Clicked pie.
Something that I can fit my music collection on!
Where do i buy an mp3 player that can read these?
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
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?
Whoah slow down their mods. Did you have a mod ejaculation?
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?
Netcraft declares InPhase is dead..
By the time their 300GB drives hit the market, the current magnetic media drives are liable to hit the 500GB or higher mark.
One megabit transfer rate? That's awful - it'd take days to fill this disk.
Does anyone know what the drives and media for this will cost?
At the right price point this could be killer for backups and media storage. 300GB media (even if write once) for less than £10 and a drive less than £200 would have me on board right away.
Unless you want to go tape (yuck) the only home user backups systems with a decent amount of data are DVDs (currently 20+ disks for my needs. ugh) or spare HDs (more expensive and cumbersome than I'd like).
A cheap HIGH capacity near-disposable media would be a godsend.
300GB in 2006 WORM 200 milliseconds access time ..
Pff... this thing is dead before it hits the market.
No Wireless, less space than a (my favourite technology). Lame.
You, guys, are not going to trust your vital data to someone called Murphy, are you? :)
A mod hack? How do you get one of these?
pages, you dumb fags.
i can finally back up my hard drive so i can do the properly install i want to do.
-- Karma Karma Karma Karma, Karma Chameleon - Boy George
Forgetting storage space for a moment I thought being optical these drives were supposed to have much better bandwidth however a 20-MByte transfer rate seems pretty puny, what gives?
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.
http://flexyourrights.org/busted/bt-download.html
t ion=torrent&info_hash=592b34df33f51ad5b262f1a83f98 6b31ae5ede83
http://flexyourrights.org/tracker/download.php?ac
...that there are persistant rumors in the Mac/Apple community that there the existing line of iPods is about to be enhanced with a new addition, the: iPod 'Brick'. The new iPod will weigh in at a hefty 1,6 Kg but marketing research has indicated that it will nevertheless be popular as an antithesis to the diminutive iPod 'Mini'.
PS. Dont tell anybody else we might get sued.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
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.
InPhase technology uses a camera chip designed by FillFactory, a Belgian chip maker.
Now if you are British, you are probably thinking of this.
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
Will holographic images of porn be visible on the back side of the disc ?
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.
Isn't there new drive technology supposed to be out later this year with a huge density improvement?
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.
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?
Butt-Head: Huhhuhh huhhhuh...he said back side...
Beavis: Rulez!
So realistically how long until we see information stored on crystals ala Babylon 5. All I'm seeing so far is technology increasing the capacity of spinning discs. Drives with such high speed parts tend to have low MTBF.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For Longhorn
300 GB ought to be enough for anyone
All your Sybase are belong to us.
Don't you find this is HUGE ??? 0.2s to access a piece of data !!! I wouldn't be surprised if my USB Key was faster than that ! I think this is gonna be a serious problem ...
how much porn can college students store.
OK, I can wait for a 300 GB drive next year, which will begin with a high price and have limited availability ... or ...
I can buy a 300 GB EIDE drive for $165 from PriceWatch, now.
Taking all bets on the outcome.
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.
...Microsoft announced today that it's next major release of Windows will require 290G of disk space to be installed.
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?
Imagine the data loss when someone thoughtlessly dictates "Computer. End Program" into their speech recognition software and the disc ceases to exit.
Does this mean I can get a 1TB 'ancient mechanical electronic drive' for 20 bucks in a few years? *yay, no more deleting my precious.. p^Z^Zdata*
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)
Right, but your FLAC files only have 2 audio channels. If they had 5.1(6) audio channels, were lossless and did cross channel redundancy checking you'd probabbly get about 2025/kpbs. DVD-audio hasn't become widely popular yet, however Since DVD-audio playing devices can all play normal audio CDs I think it's only a matter of time before 5.1 channel replaces 2-channel music. Some legitimate music download sites are already offering 5.1 channel audio version of music that comes in a 5.1 format. Ogg vorbis allows 5.1 channel music to be shared over p2p networks at a small files size.
If you think your music library is large, imagine if the files were nearly 3x as large? I have a very small collection (10gb) of mostly 128 kbit (ugh) mp3s. Mostly I ripped from CD's so the audio quality is 'good enough.' However if my collection were magically replaced with 5.1 channel lossless it would take 160 GB This is a 'small' (around 250 albums) collection. Imagine a 5,000+ album collection like many small time DJs own (and generally they own all that music 'legitimately') That's some 3.2TB in 5.1 channel, lossless compression.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
For some, AV is another word for "home movies". I've 15 minidv tapes of my kid that I'd really like to be able to get onto a random-access medium.
The cake is a pie
Which will be the standard? *frets* Maybe HOLO*RW?
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a '77 Chevy Stationwagon loaded to the brim with holographic discs barreling down the freeway at 70 MPH.
The "holography" in this media is kind of like the focus on a dual-layer DVD, only this new media uses more than two "layers".. In fact they're not layers because you're burning into one cohesive chunk of plastic, rather than gluing two separate substrates together for DVD.
Essentially the laser is split into two weaker beams, one of them shoots down at the disc, the other strikes it at an angle. Where those two beams intersect, the combined power is enough to alter the state of the media and that's how you accomplish this special kind of depth focusing.
Holography isn't just those 3D engravings you see at the science fair. It's actually closer to Star Trek..
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Here's a link to the company's web site.
I loaded it but hadn't read it. This media device Is planning on using optics as opposed to physical movement. It's currently targted at removable storage, because it's currently write once. However, the technology this device uses could pave the way for optical hard drive replacements, theoretically with capacities in the hundreds of terrabytes..
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
Guess what?
Optware are using the InPhase media.
where's the catchy school house rock rip off explaining this with a disco analogy?
Now will they use the same calculation as hard drive manufacturers in that 1,000,000,000 bytes = 1GB? Then you're only getting 930GB on what should be a TB disk. GARBAGE!!!!
However if my collection were magically replaced with 5.1 channel lossless it would take 160 GB This is a 'small' (around 250 albums) collection.
That is, you can fit 250 super high quality albums on slightly over half of a single holographic disk. So, you've got slightly less than 500 albums on a little disk. You could put a small record store in a briefcase, at that rate.
That's pretty darned good, if you ask me.
--
AC
If the data is stored in a 3-D volume, then why are they quoting storage density as bits/area? Doesn't the thickness matter?
I took a tour of InPhase recently, so I do know about this product in general (definitely not an expert though). There is not really any "high speed parts". The disk doesn't spin much at all. It rotates *very* slightly to reach a new "book", or area on the platter. The beams do their interference burn of the data and then there is a very slight rotation to the new book. Hard part is holding the disk and the beams steady while burning.
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.
The just read the "h" silently... an'olographic [object], an'istoric [object]
Really? Well, do you have a CD-ROM or DVD drive? Guess what jack-ass, that's smaller than magnetic hard drives too.
if you bothered to rtfa... or hell just read the damn title, "disc" should have clued u in... you'd realize these are competing with DVD drives being WORM, NOT HARD DRIVES. You won't even be able to write to these making them worthless to 99% of /. readers.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
introduce at 1TB... they may be worrying too much about saturating consumer markets. At this point, I think that they could max out whatever they're planning to use for assembly lines for a 1TB writable drive almost regardless of production capacity. Imagine. . . no more tape backups. Video archiving. Low-hassle data warehouses. Or the ability to put 200 TB into a desktop jukebox.
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