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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
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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Is this the MPAA? Is this the RIAA? Is this the DMCA? I thought it was the USA!