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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
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?
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?
Oh I don't know. How about Google with its caches, those guys who like burying time capsules, and businesses and governments for backing up their data? I'm sure there are more, I just don't feel like marketing right now.
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
You, guys, are not going to trust your vital data to someone called Murphy, are you? :)
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.
md5sum
d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
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
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.
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.
...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
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.
1) Clever Sig 2) ????? 3) Profit!
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.
If you e.g. have a hologram showing a gallon-sized bottle and you break it into two equally sized pieces, then you have two pictures, each showing a half-gallon-sized bottle.
So Dad would have twice as many files, but he now needs a magnifying lens for masturbating over his pr0n collection :)
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.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you e.g. have a hologram showing a gallon-sized bottle and you break it into two equally sized pieces, then you have two pictures, each showing a half-gallon-sized bottle.
yeah, and if you broke those in half again, it would change into a quart bottle, and if you did it again, you would end up with 8 pictures of a pint glass.
it gets really wacky if you keep going, you end up with a whole collection of little pictures of tablespoons.
---
Is this the MPAA? Is this the RIAA? Is this the DMCA? I thought it was the USA!
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?
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)
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.