Turner Testing Holographic Storage

Izmunuti writes "An article in ComputerWorld describes tests by Turner Entertainment of a holographic storage system from InPhase Technologies as a possible replacement for magnetic tape for storing their movies and other programs for playback and broadcast. The article states that each holographic disk holds 300 GBytes." Even more impressive is the cost per terabyte estimated for just a few years down the road.

Comments

Holographic?

[carguy84]

Can't find anything about shelf life or connection types. All I could find was that the data was stored in parallel at a million bits at a time.

Also, 27MB/sec, could that be a typo? Seems awfully slow, no?

Re:Holographic?

[jellomizer]

Well let us work it out ok.

HDTV Screen Size is 1920 * 1080 = 2,073,600 so that is the number of pixels on the highest quality HDTV
2,073,600 Pixels * 30 FPS (Frames per second for DVD Playback) = 62,208,000 Pixels / Second
Pixel is 24 bits * 62,208,000 Pixels / Second = 1,492,992,000 Bits / Second
They are 8 bits in a byte so 1,492,992,000 / 8 = 186,624,000 Bytes / second
1024 Bytes in a Kilo Byte 186,624,000 Bytes/second / 1024 = 182,250 KB/Seconond
1024 Kilo Bytes in a Mega Byte = 177 Mbs per second. So for screens of random data where no compression can take place that is correct.

But the tough part to prove because I don't have the numbers is the average rate of data compression per movie. If we are able to keep compression at an average of 1/6 then we could do it. CNET.com states that HDTV Requires 19.25Mbps for HDTD transmission so I guess it does do the trick.

8" floppies anyone?

[ian_mackereth]

They'd better hope this technology takes off, or they're going to have lots of terabytes of inaccessible storage in a few years, when the spares for their readers run out...

Mind you, this is hardly a unique problem, only a large-scale concentration of a wide-spread one.

Speed, not size

[A beautiful mind]

The storage solutions are much more lacking in speed/reaction time than in size.

What I would like to see is not a 1TB harddrive, the size I can get today by buying two harddrives, but rather:

Speed: It is a real bottleneck, to wait for disk access. SCSI is expensive for the home user still.
Throughput: What, still under GB/s ?

Reliability: Since a harddrive is capable storing more and more data, it is more and more important to increase reliability, It takes time to fill up a hard drive, it takes a lot of effort if its a lot of data to backup, so more reliable hard drives would eliminate a lot of problems. I don't care about guarantee, that they exchange the disk if it blows up in x years, my data is still lost then. Let's not even talk about what happens if it's over guarantee period. I'd expect a hard drive to work for five years or so flawlessly, more isn't needed since the technology gets obsolete in that timeframe already.