Slashdot Mirror
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."
You can't fit a 13cm disc drive into a standard enclosure! Who do they think they're going to sell these to!
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Once the MPAA, RIAA and every other cultural cartel gets a hold of this, it will die like the DAT tape.
They should just release it as a means of backing up data and then figure out the copy protection.
-We get a new storage medium.
-They squable for 5 years.
-Then *MAYBE* they come out with a larger capacity disks with DRM for TVs/movies
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
No, they're missing the real advantage to holographic storage: better data integrity. When a CD gets scratched, you lose actual bits. But with a holograph, every little piece of the disk contains the entire image. Try it with a real holograph some time... cover up the bottom half, and you can still see the entire thing. Even break it in two, and you have two identical (albeit dimmer and with a limited perspective) versions of the original. Just so long as they are smart about the way they implement it, and the sensors are a good deal more sensitive than they need to be, this kind of media should be a lot more robust than current CDs and DVDs, and maybe even hard drives.
I could imagine that those things would be great for doing backups, but: Will they be reliable ?
When writable DVDs and DVD burners got affordable I was thrilled at first: Finally being able to backup several GB of data to one not too expensive disk instead of on a stack of CD-Rs ! But then reality hit: Compatibility problems between individual brands of burners and brands of media, quality problems with media, even worse durability than CD-Rs; altogether more or less a total gamble if you want to do backups with that stuff. Now my DVD burners collect dust or are mostly used as CD burners only. So what is a high capacity medium good for if it is not reliable besides making expensive coasters and wall clocks ?
In 1982, I had an Atari 400 (5MHz 8bit 6502) with a tape drive which cost $500. I upgraded its 16KB RAM to 48KB (replacement) for $500, and the tape to an 88KB (double sided) floppy for $500. Now I can get a P4/3.0GHz for $300, a $104 300GB HD, and 1GB RAM for $60. That's 1440x the CPU bandwidth, 16.4Mx the storage, 10.4Mx the memory for a dollar - which is itself worth less than half its value (in noncomputer goods) of a quarter-century ago. And the HD is 1/10th the size (volume), while the other components are about the same size. So it's clear that storage technology has advanced the most during the "PC revolution", by a factor of a thousandfold. The only competing tech is the transformation of my $500 300bps modem and $50:month Compuserve account to a $50 6Mbps DOCSIS modem at $50:month, which is 20-200Kx cheaper for WAN.
I'm all for putting that 300GB into a cheap, tiny device. All the other cheap, even mobile networked computing has created mainstream demand for archive, beyond memory and storage. But I'm betting on it not because storage tech is somehow lagging. I'm betting on it because that industry is by far the highest performing personal computing innovation we've got.
--
make install -not war
I have around 11TB of disk drives at home. You will too, within the timeframe of something like this becoming available. At that point, 300GB/disc will be just as worthless a 8.5GB DVD would be to you right now.
Besides, there's no indication that these discs will be available in a writeable format.
Anyway, a single-drive LTO and, say, four tapes would only set you back a couple grand. If your home data is important, it's not THAT bad.
Personally, I subdivide and mirror my data on a couple machines. That's good enough for my needs.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
http://p2pnet.net/story/7124
Once again, the post-office will become the king of high latency high bandwidth. Hollywood should quake in their boots over this, not on-line file sharing.
If these things are inexpensive enough ond can imagine peer-to-peer postal networks popping up. Say you record half of something on on DVD, and you send it to someone. They send you back half of something, and then you send the other half and so-on. tit for tat.
The problem with the above concept is that it requires the sender and the receiver to actually haveing something each other actually wanted to exchange. But if the disks get big enough you could easily put many things on them increasing the probability that one or more things on their will be something someone else wants to share. It costs you no extra postage to send 1 thing as 100 things now.
So this might blow that wide open. And sharing 100 to 1000 movies per 32 cent stamp, or sharing every single top 40 song for the last 100 years on a single Disk and it wont take long before everyone has every song and movie.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
For data backup purposes, 300GB would be great. I find myself burning off about 5 DVD's a week worth of data and I can't keep up.
However, once we start thinking about the new kinds of technologies for video distribution, therein lies the problem. For now, say you can put 4 episodes of a television show on 1 DVD. So now, we have 7 DVD's for one television season, plus 9 seasons. Movie studios will not give up that business model. Each of those 4 episodes sells for $35-$50. What happens when all of the sudden you can put the entire series on one HVD or HD-DVD or Blue-ray disc? It won't happen. They will make "higher quality" versions of the same media and still find some way to put 4 episodes on one disk.
What I really want is to spend $50 on an entire television series, with 1 - 5 discs. That is all.
Even if it fits in current enclosures, it will never be a consumer-grade product like DVD-RW is now. Home DVD-RW for home theater just dropped below $100, and internal drives for desktops are under $30. Blu-Ray/HD-DVD could get there in 5 years (doubtful, as HD will remain a premium item for most of that time).
Until there is a demand for prerecorded media with 300GB on it, there won't be the impetus to make these items cheap. They'll remain in the computer-room-only expensive category.
What might make this technology fly is not a 300GB, 13cm platter, but a PSP UCD-sized disk for portable media with, day, 20GB on it. However, I suspect that falling flash memory prices will overtake this too quickly for it to have much impact on portable media players, camcorders, etc.
It will be valuable and marketable to the server room customers, but don't expect Dell to include these babies in a $399 desktop for at least 6 years.
Design for Use, not Construction!
I'm sorry, but this sounds more than a little problematic. At ten times the write speed of a normal DVD, it sounds like buffer underruns would be the rule rather than the exception, unless you were able to use a medium-sized hard drive as a buffer. That means that you're looking not so much at the problem of disc errors from the drive's own hardware, but rather from disc errors because existing hardware can't keep up with it. It would be nice if write speeds could be decreased for compatibility, but this topic hasn't seem to come up yet AFAIK. ((I am not an expert; I'm just saying what I've read.) CD and DVD burners have this ability, but if HVD's depend on such a parallelized method for writing data, then who knows?)
And yes, I agree with the person who complained the loudest at the fact that the discs are larger. (I'll let you argue among yourselves over which of you that was.) After you invent a disc that can hold that much information, making the concession of perhaps even 20% capacity per disc so that the drive fits in existing computer cases is an excellent tradeoff. An important thing about all the other well-known breakthroughs in computer hardware is that it didn't require everything else to radically conform to the new standard it offered. If I want to build a state-of-the-art box with one of these drives in it, I should not have to make major allowances for this device like I would for...say, the motherboard and processor (32 or 64 bit?) or the graphics card (PCI-Express? Maybe also an AGP port for a legacy card?).
If the drive has to be larger, then so does the case. Consequently, you have to have specially-resized versions of existing CD and DVD drives, and other optical devices that were originally designed for another size. (At the very least, you would need an adapter kit to make a smaller device fit properly inside a larger bay.) Only a manufacturer with arrogance that rivals that of Microsoft would require perfectly-good standards to be rewritten just for them.
So, while I would be one of the first to welcome this technology, I still think it requires a bit more thought before the public should get their hands on it.
This is moronic. This is annoying. I am beside myself with frustration. (Well, not really. --I don't actually care.)
The fundamental truth of the matter is that the technology which is readily possible, and the technology which is actually made available to the public, are decades apart. After all. . , why nip the spirit of profit in the bud when you can produce and sell entire production runs of stone-age computer tech one incrementally advanced stage after another? Heck, this keeps the economy 'healthy' during peace times, ensures jobs and an appetite for more and more junk technology. "Planned Obsolescence" is reality.
When everybody gets all excited about the big "new" thing, I groan. We're being led on and sold crap because there are miles and miles of money to be made between now and when the really good stuff is released, which of course, only happens when it doesn't matter anymore.
So who cares? Just let me have enough technology to do what I need to do. Those needs were well met about five years ago, so honestly, I don't really care about any new so-called 'advances'.
And the band plays on. . .
-FL