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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.
Mmmmmm... vapor...
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That's all I want to know. :-)
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?
Mind you, this is hardly a unique problem, only a large-scale concentration of a wide-spread one.
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.
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From the article: "Their production version promises to be much faster than tape, but we've not seen that yet," Tarasoff said.
So we're reading an article about an executive excited about a prototype demo to his bosses involving technology that won't be available for a year or more??? If that's acceptable, then I have a lot of articles to write!
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but this and this is. Why did the summary only link to the press release and not the info? I had to browse the site a little get some interesting stuff.
And for my fellow PDF viewing overlords, read this this and this.
Because the technology is optical, it shouldn't really be thought of as an equivalent of CD or DVD, but more akin to tape technology for long-term backup. In that respect, its current lab throughput of 27MB/sec is comparable to LTO2 tapes, the projected 160MB/sec for the production version is much higher than most backup technologies today.
While there is a market for big and fast storage, there are ultimately trade-offs between the two. 1TB in a 12cm disk is going to have some physical limitations, firstly the maximum speed of rotation before the disk breaks itself apart and secondly the data density which if it's using holographic methods will be using the volume of the medium, not just the surface. taking those limitations into account, it's clear to see that improvements in access times and transfer speeds lie with the accuracy of the seek and read hardware, which will be improved over time based on past optical technologies.
So I'd see this initially as a volume storage backup solution primarily, not a hard drive replacement, or even a home-user class backup system. The industry that I work in would be a prime user of this kind of storage. for instance, we're shooting a 28 part stop-frame animated series in High Definition, current calculated storage requirements for all those frames is 14TB. Online storage for editing is a bank of three Apple Xraids with around 8TB in each one, but how do we archive it? Currently it's dumped onto HD tapes, but eventually we'll need to keep the raw stop-frame footage, and we'll need to find 14TB of space somewhere. In that event, 14 holographic discs totalling $1400 is much more appealing than archiving to 1555 dual layer DVDs or 70 tapes, regardless of the amount of time taken to access it, which will most likely be to restore it to the Xraid for future editing and reference.
How lomg till some corporation vehemently opposes this one?
the second a home version is released without 60 pounds of restrictions and the owner is evil settings applied to it.
DVD writing at home started the MPAA whining. Although frinds and myself have been backing up DVD's to DLT for almost 6 years now (lots more space and reliability with cheapness now that DLT-V drives can be had for almost nothing on ebay as well as tapes.)
they do not scream that DLT is dangerous because 99% of the consumers dont even know what it is let alone have one.
so it takes me 12 minutes to load a backup and burn to a DVD-RW to watch it or to load it to the transcoder and then push it to dvarchive to view it on the replay tv... who cares.
it's a mass storage medium it can be used for good or evil uses. I prefer evil uses.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Moreover, given the patents would have had to be registered a long time ago (in that galaxy far, far, away), they've probably expired by now.
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"I don't get it... It's going to burn at 160MB/sec but only read at 27MB/sec?"
Assuming this isn't vapourware.. perhaps their optics burn all holographic layers at one go, but can only read the layers one by one
There are no atheists when recovering from tape backup.
I don't understand why companies like this don't opt for just sticking with redundant online storage as opposed to offline such as this. With online, as you upgrade over the years, your archived data gets moved along with, and thus you've no worries about obsolescence of your media or reader. I've heard the argument that the storage space is too costly, though that wouldn't seem to pan out. As time goes by, the MB/GB/TB per dollar will increase, and that data you have archived will become trivial in size pretty quickly. I would think, at least in this sort of application, that a good SAN (where storage is essentially abstracted) would negate the need for this.
If it works that's some pretty impressive technology but I suspect it has a few problems that aren't mentioned that are currently impossible to solve. What makes me think this is the way that all the major electronic manufacturers aren't falling over themselves to buy this company or developer their own version. If this really worked the first person to market would make a fortune. Who knows, maybe they have soved the difficult problems. It would be good if they had.
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That's 1.6 million pictures of breasts. Considering that there are 86400 seconds in a day, you have to see 18.5 pictures/second to see them all each day.
The refresh rate on a monitor these days is 90Hz, so it can display 90 images/second or 7,776,000 images per day. With other words you need 5 of such disks to make full use of you computer and that's even without using dual screen, or higher refresh rates. We still have a long way to go.
People once said the same thing about blue laser hd-dvd's. And, before that, they were saying it about DVD too.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Wow. That comment really makes you sit back and shake your head in amazement.
Not so long ago, we were talking about which drives gave the best cost per megabyte.
Now we're talking about cost per terabyte.
Simply amazing.
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
They figure out how to get managed copy on holographic storage, they'll make the transition
Well, they have been talking about holographic storage for almost 20 years now and one would have thought it would have been here 5 years ago with a TB or more of storage, which would have been something. But now they are saying 1.6TB by 2010. Come on. Hard drives in 2010 will probably be 1.6TB or more.
I was chatting with one of the engineers regarding this at the National Association of Broadcasters show this year. Apparently, they were just getting things finished off and ready for what was their latest generation of holographic storage. One thing that was interesting is that the maximum data rate was just under the data rate for 720p/1080i (around 680Mbit/s versus ~750Mbit/s). I mentioned to him that he should really try to get the data rate up so that they could record and play back live HD material, but things were apparently wrapped up pretty well by the time I had talked to him. He mentioned a large network that wanted to use this for long-term storage and retrieval of video, presumably to reduce the necessity for large tape robots like StorageTek provides.
A couple of other interesting facts about the device - the rotational rate of the device is actually extremely slow. You wouldn't see it spinning or even barely moving unless you really looked at it. They use Ultra320SCSI as an electrical interface to the discs. These guys were co-promoting with Maxell in the Maxell booth itself on the media that's in these large cartridges similar to the old MO discs, but larger. The holodiscs themselves were about half an inch thick and were completely transparent, and had excellent archival characteristics and stability (>100 years IIRC). The drives themselves were about the size of a two-drive external SCSI drive box, but fairly long (probably around a foot or slightly longer) and black in color. Media was something like $179 per disc and the drives themselves were $6k-$10k, IIRC. Finally, I asked him why they wouldn't just put the disc into a cube format (read: all your information on your keychain), but he mentioned that the translational control of the cube to read and write the information would be overly complicated electromechanically though it could technically be done.
My guess is that you won't see this technology filter down to the average joe for at least 5-7 years. Hopefully it'll be worth the wait.
Graphic on InPhase Technologies website: "Imagine Holding 100 movies in the palm of your hand"
*riiing*
Secretary: "Hello InPhase Technologies, may I help you?"
Secretary: "Oh hello Mr. Glickman of the MPAA"
Secretary: "Our CEO Mr. Diaz is in a meeting at the moment, may I take a message?"
Secretary: "So the message is 'No...effen...way' ?"
The number you get is not 177 Mbs per second, it is 177 MBps (Mega Bytes per second as you say), whyle the number from CNet is 19.25 Mbps (mega bits per second), and it refers to MPEG2 compression of the stream.
In this case there is plenty of bandwidth available because 19.25 Mbps = 2.40 MBps < 27 MBps. In any case, MPEG4 compression can do much lower bitrates for HDTV video, but I strongly doubt that they will use any kind of lossy compression for their stored archive video.
Only problem with holographic memory is that sequential erasure will not work. You'd have to feed it a tapeworm to selectively seek out and destroy unwanted data.
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The problem is that, like all potential backup technology, it will almost certainly be either way too small or priced way beyond the reach of the general public. You could burn an entire spool of 50 DVDs, which would only cost about $15, but would take approximately 8 hours 20 minutes to burn them on a typical 8x drive, assuming you don't burn any coasters (unlikely) and assuming that you religiously monitor it and switch discs every ten minutes for an entire day. Alternately, you could back up your hard drive on dual-layer discs, but you would have to spread it over two days (DL discs max out at 4x, or about 16 hours 40 minutes, or one disc per 40 minutes) and pay $150 for that same backup. Half as fast, costs ten times as much. If this is progress, I'd hate to see what regression looks like.
At the current rate of expansion, I'd expect the 300GB holographic discs to cost $500 apiece.... The good news is that this pattern would also predict about a 10 day backup period, while in reality, they are slightly faster than 16x DVD-R media, with a full backup time coming in at a mere 3.5 hours for that 250GB drive. Not bad.
Sell them for $5 per disc and I'm interested. I'm still betting they end up costing more than an $80, 250GB hard drive, though, in which case they'd be a total eye roll just like magnetic tape....
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