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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."
Turner Network Television recently aired a commercial off of the InPhase Tapestry drive. Maxell built that drive for InPhase.
Data backup has become very expensive for some of my customers. The amount of data a company of even minimal size (50 employees) goes through in a day blows my mind. We've been investing every option but none are cost effective (except when a hard drive goes).
My dilemma is that as backup storage (such as the HVD) gets bigger, it seems that hard drives quickly outpace the new form of backup storage. 1.6TB discs sound great, yet I'm weary of having that much data on an easy to break/burn/steal disc. 300GB is more feasible as I can see making a few copies of the backup "just in case."
Nonetheless, the write speeds listed don't seem all that great, and what interfaces will let us copy data at those speeds? Moving 1.6TG of data off of a server without slowing down user access (24 hours per day with offshore employees) sounds like it will still take hours and hours to back up (if not longer). A recovery stage would take even longer.
For now, I'm happiest with redundancy backups. I don't like mirroring or RAIDx/y or clusters (too many nightmares over the 15 years I've worked with all of it), but having a server dupe itself daily has given us the best turnover and safety margins we've seen, as well as being very cost effective compared to use-once media or (shudder) tapes.
This stuff has been a year or two away as long as I can remember. Someone wake me up when product actually ships...
TODO: Something witty here...
It's not just that it's a fast drive. It goes well beyond the current method of spinning the disc faster and(or) putting the data closer together to increase performance.
"Unlike other technologies, that record one data bit at a time, holography allows a million bits of data to be written and read in parallel with a single flash of light," says Liz Murphy, of InPhase Technologies. "This enables transfer rates significantly higher than current optical storage devices."
That's pretty wild for a single "head" drive. I wonder if this could translate into devices similar to hard drives using similar methods. Hard disks are what I feel is holding back system performance. It's almost always the biggest bottleneck in a system, and has been more or less at a platoe for years, mainly because magnetic media can only do so much in a serial manor.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
At my job we use LTO drives( $ 10k per 24 tape drive) + tapes (400 gb compressed on one tape,$50 per tape ) which is ridiculously expensive but works ok . But for home it is not acceptable solution .Right Now I am in desperate need for a backup solution for my home machine - I have 750 Gb and plan go over 1 tb in next quarter. And I am basicaly either have to go with RAID 5 ( ~$1k for 1 TB ) which I dont like since I want incrementally buy more storage - not pay upfront big bucks only to find out that half a year later cost would be halfed. Something liek 300 Gb dvd would be a god sent to me.
A "conventional DVD" has two layers, and holds roughly 9Gb of data. 300 / 9 = 33 1/3, not 60. Even recordable DVDs are well and truly available in 9Gb formats by now, and have been for some time. OK, the media is more expensive than single layer discs, but the technology is in people's PCs now. And how much are these discs going to cost for the first few years of their existence?
Is 300 GB necessary? From a content producer standpoint, I don't want to be able to fit that much content on a single disc... then I can't charge as much for the special 4-disc pre-Christmas release edition.
From a consumer standpoint, I don't need this either, unless I want to archive all my files, in which case it's easier (and cheaper) to have a second hard drive.
I understand there is demand for high-volume storage solutions, but I can't see a mass market for them...
What I do see being very, very useful is the speed upgrade for r/w -- especially for gaming, but I'm sure this applies to other areas as well.
IMO, though, I don't see a big enough demand for this to become profitable for quite a long time -- especially if Bluray or HD-DVD is 'good enough' for the average user.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Plenty of people already do error correction at line speed on gigabit communications links with low power costs. To someone developing coding schemes, storage devices can just be modeled as another communications channel.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Even if it is a small change in physical size for the media I'm not too hot on that. I like how our DVD storage is the same size as the previous generation of CDs. The result is that all of my data recorded on CD-R from 8 years ago is still readable and I use it from time to time on our new drives... You can't say that for many other optical or magnetic storage media of odd sizes. Zip Disks, SuperDisks, Jaz Drives... Maybe they're going for a different market, but you think these folks would leave their options open.
There are also good things to be said about leaving the past behind, and not keeping the same physical form factor.
Opinions?
It is quite possible now that standards could be developed where they simple ignore the US market. Certainly it is the biggest in the world right now- but if they got flack from the RIAA/MPAA cronies in Congress-- they could simply say- ok- you can't have this great technology. They could sell in Japan, Europe, China, India, etc.... Companies and individuals would see these things saving money/time provided by this media in their overseas operations-- and then they would start hitting their Congresspeople ever harder than the media industry ever could.
Whatever. If you buy decent stuff, there are no problems with DVD media or burners.
I'm a little confused by some of the responses I'm seeing here. It seems most people think that this new technology would be a bad thing? The largest complaint I've seen so far is: "What if I lose the disk?" I don't know about you guys, but for me this isn't much different then anything else in the world. If your backup is important... don't lose it!
If needed, I have some handy solutions to solve the "How do I not lose my disk" problem.
1. Put it some place that you can remember.
2. If it's super important, make two backups.
3. Tie a string around your finger to remind you to always remember where you put your disk.
4. Ask somebody more responsible than yourself to watch over it for you.
And if none of these work...
5. Buy a small cable. Run the cable through the hole in the center of the disk. Buy a small padlock. Padlock the cable around a large object. Make multiple copies of the padlock key and tape them in various places.
Obviously this is not practical, but it is about as practical as thinking that a new technology is bad because you might misplace it.
The capacity and speed issues are wonderful. But how stable is the medium? Magnetic media was good for five years minimum. DVDs are good for about twenty before delamination issues threaten the data. In truth there is no stable medium for data. Paper has a better longevity. The best longevity is still clay tablets, but not very practical for the volume of data we need to secure.
Having dealt with data retention for a good 20 years now, I am concerned that whenever there is news of a breakthrough in storage media, it is all about capacity and speed and nothing is said about stability and longevity.
It's great to know how fast the car will go and how much you can haul, but when will the wheels fall off?
How much critical data from our era will acutally survive? I know, how much of it SHOULD survive? That is a different issue, one also faced by data archivists. Let's leave that one alone for now. The burning issue for me is, if I WANT it to survive 200 years, is there a storage medium I can use to insure that? Or do I just make sure there is a clean printout that I seal in a zip lock bag. ( almost joking here...)
Not only that, the 5.25" refers to the size of an old floppy disk - not the size of the enclosure.
... and then they built the supercollider.
The storage media for digital theater projectors.
So instead of having to install a bank of hard drives just for single 120-minute movie in uncompressed digital format, you can reduce it all to a single HVD disc plus protective caddy weighing at most 5-6 ounces. This could drastically cut the cost of digital theater projection, since all you need is a small player connected by a high-data rate cable to the digital projector itself. You also have the major advantage of drastically reducing media duplication and shipping costs, too.
"So this might blow that wide open. And sharing 100 to 1000 movies per 32 cent stamp,"
Yeah... the fact that you don't even know the price of a stamp for a first class letter (currently $0.37, going to $0.39 next month) demonstrates just how prevalent this thinking is: little to none.
The problem with the USPS is that it requires people to get out of their chairs and walk out to their mailboxes, thereby exposing themselves to actual sunlight. People are inherently lazy.