300 gigabytes in the size of a DVD?
Rollie Hawk writes "Although storage space is no longer the premium it once was, physical backups and external media have been slow to catch up. While recordable DVDs may be fine for backing up a single workstation, large servers are still forced to rely on swappable drives and tape backups. But holographic disc technology could be changing all of that in the very near future. Holographic Versatile Discs (HVDs) have been in the works for some time now by various companies, including InPhase Technologies (formerly part of Lucent) and Japan's Optware (which claimed to have made the first recording of a movie on a holographic disc last year). InPhase's HVDs, scheduled for release in 2006, are said to hold 300GB of data, 60 times that of a conventional DVD with only a slight increase in size. That translates to more than a day's worth of HD-quality video. Not to mention the drives themselves can read and write at ten times the speed a normal DVD drive. One of InPhase's partners in HVD research, Maxell, is working towards even more storage on a 1.6TB disc."
"The article notes that the transfer rate is at an average of 1 gigabit/second. That is equal to 0.125 gigabytes/second, or 128 megabytes/second, which is a large leap over earlier storage mediums, whose transfer rates are generally measured in Kilobytes/second. In comparison, a 56x CD-ROM drive transfers at up to 8.4 Megabytes/second, and 16x-speed DVDs transfer at 22 Megabytes/second."
That is impressive indeed. But I have a question regarding the random errors etc due to statistical variation. How much resources do you have to devote for error correction (eg parity bit etc) ? And wouldn't it be very power consuming to do error correction at such a high data transfer rate ?
HDD will always be a bottleneck because they require actual physical movement. Even on the high end it is still thousands of times slower than you can move electrons through a bus. The only hardware solution to the problem is to compensate with allot of caching, or start using solid state storage. This is partly why Google stores data on huge banks of RAM.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
Why not? Old floppies are 13.33cm in diameter.
That's usually a pretty good (but not absolute) indicator that it's about to ship. It's also often an indicator that it's priced for mid to large sized corporations, not for small companies or individuals.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Thought so myself. But the usually very reliable German computing magazine c't ran several tests over last couple of years that showed great quality problems even with expensive brand name media and writers. The results they got strongly depended on the combination of burner and media, and considering that even brand name media often is manufactured by changing OEMs makes selection of a working combination mere luck. Apparently it's slowly becoming better, but still.
5.25" = 13.34 cm.
Why wouldn't you be able to fit a disc having a diameter of 13cm in a 5.25" enclosure ?
Really? Reeks of bullshit? That's funny...
...because your statement reeks of ignorance. FYI, what's 2 years old is DVD *burners* capable of writing to Dual-Layer discs. Your ancient DVD player does, in fact, read dual-layer mass-produced DVD videos. IOW, you are wrong. Why is it that people on Slashdot feel the need to declaim endlessly on subjects they don't understand, and then jump all over the people who do?
This ought to enlighten you a bit, and hopefully you'll learn to shut up (and do a quick Google) when those more knowledgeable than yourself attempt to educate you. You might wait on using the word "bullshit" until you've checked your facts.
Ce n'est pas un vrai mouvement de robot!
In holographic media, read and write operations are usually done using different laser wavelengths. You use a "recording" wavelength to record an interference pattern in the media, and a "reading" wavelength which will diffract into the interference pattern and restore the original image.
These wavelengths need to be different because holographic materials work like photographic films. If you try to read the hologram with a wavelength to which the holographic material is sensitive, you will destroy the interference pattern, and therefore the data.
Wikipedia states that a 532nm laser is used for both reading and writing operations. That means they use a different way to store the hologram. Would anyone have more information about this ?
It's already 5 years in jail for copying a dvd per incident. If you sent 100 movies that's 500 years. How much worse can using the post office be after that?
Yeah, that's "Funny"
Hey, I'm just your average shit and piss factory.
There is no way you had TEN GIGABYTES of storage in 1982... your 8 bit cpu couldn't count that high anyway.
the enclosure is 14.6 cm wide.