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?

[Stachel]

that seems kind low

That is because

Second-generation rewriteable products are due in 2007 or 2008, Murphy said

Releasing 1.5 TB disks would satisfy the storage market immediately. They first get people interested in the 'low density' variant, then those people will become greedy again for the higher density versions in 2007 or 2008.

Re:300gb?

[AstrumPreliator]

It's sort of the same, but then again not really. From InPhase's website:

Light from a single laser beam is split into two beams, the signal beam (which carries the data) and the reference beam. The hologram is formed where these two beams intersect in the recording medium.

The process for encoding data onto the signal beam is accomplished by a device called a spatial light modulator (SLM). The SLM translates the electronic data of 0's and 1's into an optical "checkerboard" pattern of light and dark pixels. The data is arranged in an array or page of around a million bits. The exact number of bits is determined by the pixel count of the SLM.

At the point of intersection of the reference beam and the data carrying signal beam, the hologram is recorded in the light sensitive storage medium. A chemical reaction occurs in the medium when the bright elements of the signal beam intersect the reference beam, causing the hologram stored. By varying the reference beam angle, wavelength, or media position many different holograms can be recorded in the same volume of material.

Re:300gb?

[Anonymous Coward]

"This does not seem to be holographic in the sense we are expecting."

What sense were you expecting? A normal holographic image does precisely that, chemical reactions induced by light, it's the same basic principle as normal photography. The difference is that you use lasers (coherent phase background), and increase resolution to the point that you can store not just amplitude but relative phase information of the wavefront.

The full wave front of light, including the relative phase is sufficient to recreate the entire wave, including all "3D information". This is known in physics as Huygen's Principle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huygens_principle

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.

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?

Reply to previous poster

[Rupan]

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!

Re:O... kay...

[0x461FAB0BD7D2]

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.

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

Murphy said...

[jdegre]

You, guys, are not going to trust your vital data to someone called Murphy, are you? :)

Re:Murphy said...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd trust Robocop with my life, you insensitive clod!

More technical info

[the_pooh_experience]

As per an optics and photonics news article I just read:

"Three-dimensional volume holographic data storage is used in photopolymer media to potentially achieve storage densities of 1 Tb/in^2 with transfer rates greater than 200 MB/s. Such densities are enabled by a novel two photopolymer chemistry approach, in addition to special techniques for making exceptionally flat (lambda/10) surfaces that provide high storage densities in cubic pho6tololymer media with volumes of tens of mm^3."

Re:'One million bits at a time'

[nmg196]

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.

No multiplexing other than spatial ?

[Cochonou]

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.

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:Belgian chips...

[Cochonou]

What is interesting here is that FillFactory designs CMOS-APS detectors instead of the more traditional CCD imagers.
APS stands for Active Pixel Sensor: basically the main difference with CCD's is that you get the line and row selection transistors, and an amplification transistor built in every pixel. That means you don't have to transfer the charge from pixel to pixel over the whole matrix as in CCDs: you can directly address the detector matrix as you would do on RAM.
The main drawback is that these selection and amplification units take room on the silicium, and therefore prevent the whole surface of a pixel to be sensitive to light. This is what is called the fill factor : the amount of a pixel which is effectively capturing light.
FillFactory (now owned by Cypress Semiconductors) have promising patents related to increasing the fill factor - hence their name.

Re:O... kay...

[Angstroem]

Imagine travelling with it: "Oh jeez, Jimmy, you dropped the Holographic Disc! Now dad lost all his files."

Au contraire... One of the strange qualities of holograms is that if you break one, each piece contains all information -- just scaled down.

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 :)

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.

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.