Slashdot Mirror
Holographic Storage Crams in 0.5TB Per Square Inch
An anonymous reader writes "VNUNet is reporting that a company called InPhase Technologies claims they have successfully recorded 515GB of data per square inch to capture the record for highest data density. From the article: 'InPhase promised to begin shipping the first holographic drive and media later this year. The first generation drive has a capacity of 300GB on a single disk with a 20Mbps transfer rate. The first product will be followed by a family ranging from 800GB to 1.6TB capacity.'"
It doesn't in a different league from current HD. I don't see them with a different value proposition from the traditional competitors and yet they have this completely new and untested technology. I'm afraid they would go too soon on the market.
can it hold my pr0n collection?
I suggest you read Slashdot
It will be based around PSTP: Postal Storage Transport Protocol. Mailmen will deliver holographic boxes to your door which plug into your local network delivering you that day's version of the entire Internet... No more IP address shortage, bandwidth problems, or ISPs to deal with. Ah yes.. it makes perfect sense!
Hexy - a strategy game for iPhone/iPod Touch
They could fit in the SAN market.
ten ponds of pron in a five pround bag ... er wait
...so the first discs will have half a square inch of surface area?
300GB capacity at 20Mbps... Can someone check the math on that? I'm thinking overnight backups aren't even going to be possible.
So does this effectively end the subject of blue ray vs. HDDVD as the standard for the comming years or what?
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
I guess we'll be ready when Professor Moriarty and the Countess Regina Bartholomew want to explore the galazy.
I think it's so sad that I remember that episode and even the name of a minor character.
I was looking for some details on the storage mechanism and specifications of data decay, reliability and such, I didn't see anything on that. Will normal error correction be sufficient for such a device, or does it make sense to use the same disk to write every bit of data onto it more than once in different locations, say 3 times alltogether and when reading, compare the bits and chose the value that happens at least 2/3 times? Will data decay on this media any faster or any slower than on a normal magnetic disk?
You can't handle the truth.
Well, it really doesn't. The only people who NEED terabytes or more can already afford that much in hard drives. But that's mostly what the summary mentions. That and data density by physical size... which isn't really that important.
...and so on. Those areas are where advances could REALLY make a difference.
What I want to know is, how does this technology stack up against hard drives or other existing technologies on issues like
- Data read speed
- Data write speed
- Power consumption
- Heat and/or noise
- Size and complexity of read/write mechanism
- Resistance to physical damage
- Rate of data decay
OK, 515 GB per square inch, and the first product will be a 300 GB single disk. So that disk is less than a square inch? Sweet! And you thought the iPod flea was a joke...
That is almost better then breasts!!!
Sounds slow:
...hopefully writes arent slower
> 20Mbps transfer rate
which equals about 2.5 MBps (megabytes per second). It would take about 8 days to read a whole 1.6 GB disk
And the density sounds like half a terabit, not terabyte:
> after successfully recording 515Gb of data per square inch.
> In April 2005 we demonstrated 200 Gb/in data density
~XT
For high output data rate, one must read holograms with many pixels per page in a reasonably short time. To read a megapixel hologram in about 1 ms with reasonable laser power and to have enough signal at the detector for low error rate, a diffraction efficiency around eta = 3 × 105 is required. To write such a hologram in 1 ms, to achieve input and output data rates of 1 Gb/s, the sensitivity for this example must be at least S'eta2 = 20 cm2/J.
Since this hologram was retrieved using a readout pulse of 1 ms, this experiment implements the optical signal (but not the subsequent fast electronic readout) of a system with a readout rate of 1 Gb/s.
Erm... doesn't Holographic imply three dimensions? Wouldn't it be cubic inch?
"42"
At that point, Mr. Watkins picked up a chair and threw it across the room hitting a table in his office. Mr. Watkins then said: "Fucking Nelson Diaz (President and CEO of InPhase Technologies) is a fucking pussy. I'm going to fucking bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to fucking kill InPhase Technologies." ....
Thereafter, Mr. Watkins resumed trying to persuade me to stay....Among other things, Mr. Watkins told me that "InPhase Technologies not a real company. It's a house of cards."
They are using optical storage technology, not terribly dissimilar to CD-R and DVD-R technology.
So, how well do their disks stand up against bit-rot?
"from 800GB to 1.6TB capacity."
Get your VC in order, _then_ release your Marketing droids...
First, this is not a dis against InPhase. If they are able to release it to market, I salute them. I wish they can get this released, as it would be a major boon to the computing community as a whole for backups.
c leID=269&SectionID=38
Holographic storage announcements seem to be popping up every so often, with a release date later that year. However it never arrives. For example, Tamarack had a product in the early 90s, made some very good announcements... then never heard anything from them publically.
Hopefully someone will release a reliable, rugged, decently fast holographic storage system, but I sometimes wonder if Duke Nukem Forever and perhaps a sequel will be released before anything like the "terabyte on a card" ever hits the consumer market.
Link here to article about a similar announcement:
http://www.industryweek.com/ReadArticle.aspx?Arti
Another link:
http://colossalstorage.net/eetimes.htm
515 Gb is only 64 GB. So about 4.6 square inches of data surface on a 300 GB disc.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Dear InPhase, please STFU and ship this shit already. This is the 1000th pointless article I've seen about this on the last two (is it three now?) years and I'm getting tired of hearing about it. I've got data that needs backing up, and whoever comes out with a 50+GB/item WORM non-tape media first is going to get my cash. At this point I use hard drives to back up instead of tapes because they cost far less per GB than the damn tapes do.
Hell is being intelligent in a world full of idiots.
Shit like this has been in the making for years. This crap is no different than BitBoys or DN4Ever.
Just google/slashdot search Constellation 3D. We were supposed to have 100GB CD's 5 years ago.
My theory is we're trapped in a TTBF (technological temporal bullshit field). As time increases the amount of bullshit we hear from startups increases.
Get your stuff strate,
...hopefully writes arent slower
which equals about 2.5 MBps (megabytes per second).
It would take about 8 days to read a whole 1.6 GB disk
now 1.6gb i assume you meen 1.6tb whitch would take 640 seconds or 10 min 40 sec's to read.
If it's holographic, aren't you more concerned with how much data per cubic inch? I mean, per square inch kind of loses meaning at that point, doesn't it?
And why is 1.6TB the largest they're offering? 3 square inches of recording surface? A 5.25" drive gives what, about 70-80 square inches of recording surface? Give me a 40TB drive for the price of a 500GB hard drive. That'll be worth something to me, otherwise I'll just stick with standard hard drives. They're cheap and fast.
Ummm... It says Gb (Giga BIT), not Byte. Which makes it less impressive, but still pretty good. RTFA!!
More promises, no product move along.
Back in 2000 or 2001 slashdot had a story about a company called C3D (or CDDD which was their stock ticker, website was http://www.c-3d.net/). This company promised 1TB and higher density discs with insane transfer speeds because it was storage...in 3D. They showed a few discs (CD sized) and a reader which were supposedly a prototype of some sort at trade shows. All of this ran their stock up quite a bit. They were promised to replace DVD's in a few years, and eventually hard drives. There was also this credit card device (10gigs) which was rewritable (?), which was to replace traditional hard drives in notebooks.
Deadline after deadline passed, the stock slowly declined ($60 a share was the norm in 2000) due to the market conditions in 2001, eventually causing it to be delisted from the NASDAQ (has a value of $0.01 a share). Rumor has it that the company was founded/owned/something by a former Israeli/Soviet general (the company wasn't located in the US), and that there never was a product (all demos were faked).
How do I know this? I was the fool who bought the stock when it was $20 a share, watched it rise up to $66, and fall to nothing. I believed before and it cost me a decent amount of money.
Holographic media has been a scam before and it'll be one until there is a box with a price tag in a store. Even then, I would be cautious about buying it.
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."
...or whatever the exact quote is, as I couldn't find a reliable source for it.
~ Andrew Tanenbaum
TFA says "515 Gb/sq.inch" (64 GB) and "300 GB per disc", so they seem to understand the difference. If so, "20 Mbps" is indeed 20 Megabits/s - which would take 33h 20m to read or write completly.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
If I could get a 1x1x1 cube, with a usb port built into it, that might be interesting. If a standard HD sized device with a sata interface had 9 sq. inches of holographic storage and held 4.5 TB of data, that would be interesting.
For all I can tell, however, this device might be .25x.25x16 inches, with the drive electronic consuming another few square inches.
Show me the money. Until then, this is Holographic Duke Storage Forever.
[url=http://colossalstorage.net/home_diskdrive.htm ]Other Holographic HD[/url]
Anybody have a clue on how much either of these things will cost?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
At the data transfer rate of 20Mbps, you would most likely be better off sending it over the network.
It sounds slow even if they DID mean MB/s. When you're dealing with one quantity measured in giga* and one in mega*, a factor of eight isn't really a HUGE issue.
here I thought I was the only one who thought of that. The whole "per square inch" thing really only counts in terms of 2-dimensional media. Which brings up the question, How many bits/square inch does this give? That is, how much per square inch, single layer? And just how many layers does this employ?
The difference between spam and poop is that you don't have to dig through septic tanks looking for real food. -- Me
From what little I know about holographic storage, write speeds are a lot slower than read speeds. Though if it could actually read at 160 MB/s like this article claims, why didn't they say that?
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Doh!
I meant 1.6TB disk, as in 1,600,000 megabytes
At 2.5 megabytes per second (20Mbps) that is 640,000 seconds = 10,666 minutes = 178 hours = 7.4 days
but then again I am stond
~XT
I'm sure this caller (WMV) (WMV, QT, Flash) has the same need for his image/video clip collection!
There's a lot of talk about how slow it is, how it doesn't contain that much data especially compared with one of those 500 gigabyte hard drives... etc etc etc
First, this is one "plate" compared with 5 plates of the 500 gig hard drives.
Second, this is a first generation product. The first CD-Rom was incredibly slow. The first DVD-Rom was incredibly slow. The first 3.5" hard drive was incredibly slow. See a pattern? This is probably going to be marketed toward those industries that use DAT tapes. As they incur most of the initial costs, the technology will improve, densities will increase and costs will fall. Is there anyone paying 400$ for a 2X CD-recorder nowadays?
Plus, these aren't being sold to consumers until 2008 which is a good decision because it allows the technology to mature.
Will these replace hard drives? In my opinion, not until 2011, sometime around there. That's when perpendicular hard drives (+ onboard flash) will reach maximum density compared with cost and holographic drives will dip under the HD price point. Considering that the industry is moving toward 2.5" HD drives as a replacement for 3.5" HD drives, holographic storage (let's start a new acronym: HS) will offer even more storage on a technology that should be hitting full stride at that point.
But this depends on HS random access times and how the research is heading toward flash memory. Flash Storage might be a competitor to HS around then.
"Tread softly because you tread on my dreams"
Since you asked most harddrives transfer at about 50 MB/s yes that's MB not Mb. The high end multimedia ones get > 300 MB/s.
considering that most home systems do not have 300 GB storage at this time, it will be impossible to write to this disk in oe session, unless its a rewiteable. that means it will be more expensive. the 800 GB and 1.6 TB are going to be for corporate clients only. how many peopl here have 1.6 TB on their home rig. I can see a few home networks having that much storage, but one computer sporting that much will be prett rare, even here. my guess is that it will not even be close to hard drive cost, where you would typically buy hard disks that are close to top of the line, but give the best price / GB ratio.
my guess is that even the 800 GB will be for corporate users, with drive costs in the thousands, and triple digit media figures. but at that price, it will have to offer bullet proof data security ie NO bit rot. i hope im wrong and drives are a couple of hundred bucks, and media 5$ a disk. for it to enter the low cost market it will have to compete with cheap ass dvd's , where ~10$ gets you 470 GB, and the drive is 30 bucks...
You *really* must have meant 1.6 *TB* instead of GB. Then your numbers would make sense.
1.6 GB * 8 * 1024 = 131107.2 Mb - megabits in 1.6 gigabytes
131107.2 Mb / 20 Mbps = 655.36 s - seconds to read at 20 megabit per second
655.36 s / 60 s = 10.92 min - convert to minutes
At 20Mbps, it would take you 4.855 days to read a terabyte, which is pitiful for local storage. (1.6TB would be 7.77 days, or the almost 8 days in the parent post.) Even at 20MBps, that is still 14.56 hours for 1 TB, which is far too slow.
This might work as a backup medium for archiving, as long as it was suposed to be 20 megabyte/s instead of megabit. Many tape systems are right around the 20MBps mark, however there are solutions out there that archive over 100MBps.
Maybe you should buy some of these things. They aren't very expensive.
With a 300GB capacity and 20Mbps tansfer rate, it would take 34 hours to read or write a single disk. Assuming they made a mistake in the transfer rate and its actually 20MBps (possible though unlikely considering HD-DVD drives are shipping with 35mbps, or ~4MBps rates), it would still take ~4 hours to transfer a disc. I can burn a 700MB CD in 5 minutes, and a 4.7GB DVD in 25 minutes.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
File management on a terabyte plus drive will be a breeze to boot (to coin a phrase).
I imagine the "find" option in Windows will have no problem nor will Spotlight. And those wonderful desktop search tools will just FLY indexing a terabyte. No sweat.
That or I'll lose 6 out of 8 hours either organizing or just searching for 2k in 2,000 gigs / 2,000,000 mbs / 2,000,000,000 kbs.
Can't wait. Or we can all wait for that wonderful file system that's yet to come.
- on that note a serious question -
WTF happened to "that guy" who was working on a desktop-calendar hybrid model for a UI? It resolved entire workdays into desktop snapshots that were presented like a scrapbook which one could flip through like a titanic personal organizer. This has been why I've been handling project data within chronological folders lately because - unless I've had serious head-trauma - I can recall WHEN I worked on something. Names? Either the one's I put in on a whim or some crypo-garbage that the app assigns? The latter really make searches fun. "That Guy" was a blurb on some TechTV show ages ago. All I can recall is he was in the Bay Area, was Jewish, and was loaded with PHDs. Which religious prefs aside makes him about as common as the water in the Bay itself as a google ref.
Still, I think this is where we have to go in future UIs - now I just need to find out where "that guy" - went.
OK, now that we've had our magical holographic storage story for the year maybe it's time to move on to a story about a super parallel computer using FPGAS.
I was looking for some details on the storage mechanism
_ 4000.html
Click on the link to InPhase Technologies, click on their press releases... hey, there it is! Looks to me like they're trying to use CD/DVD-like discs to provide backwards compatibility. As for longevity of the medium, their web site seems to indicate they're still perfecting that part of the technology.
http://www.inphase-technologies.com/news/Tapestry
"Holographic storage is a revolutionary departure from all existing recording methods because it takes advantage of volumetric efficiencies rather than only recording on the surface of the material. InPhase will deliver the industry's first holographic drive and media later this year. The first generation drive has a capacity of 300 gigabytes on a single disk with a 20 megabyte per second transfer rate. The first product will be followed by a family ranging from 800GB to 1.6 terabyte (TB) capacity."
http://news.com.com/Court+docs+Ballmer+vowed+to+ki ll+Google/2100-1014_3-5846243.html
"At some point in the conversation, Mr. Ballmer said: 'Just tell me it's not Google,'" Lucovosky said in his statement. Lucovosky replied that he was joining Google.
"At that point, Mr. Ballmer picked up a chair and threw it across the room hitting a table in his office," Lucovosky recounted, adding that Ballmer then launched into a tirade about Google CEO Eric Schmidt. "I'm going to f***ing bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to f***ing kill Google." Schmidt previously worked for Sun Microsystems and was the CEO of Novell.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_Versatile _Disc its been around for a while, will probably be out in the market by the end of the year...
me jumping with kites I make...
What the hell ever happened to the idea of holographic data storage on crystal planes that was all the talk in the late 60's.
When this stuff actually ships. I have been reading about this technology for years and there is still nothing I can buy at my local computer/electronics store.
I just never had such problems with optical media. I did have some problems with my SUSE 10.0 DVD, but a little cleaning got it back.
Vapor storage!
The article never stated whether this was intended to replace hard drives, or serve as 340 DVD+R's ducttaped together.
So I can get this to run all the vaporware I want? Then it's worth its weight in gold!
You should visit InPhase site and read their information on holographic storage. They also have few pdfs on the subject.
\
It'll still take over 2 hours to view it all.
What would happen if we invested heavily into developing factories to manufacture these, stuffed them into cheap durable nintendo style units, preload every book indexed by the google book project and every song we could lay our hands on and distributed them to every man, woman and child on earth?
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Holographic memory "sounds" cool.
Costs more per bit than ATA or SCSI?
Slower than legacy ATA?
And 1.5 Terabyte max?
If the drive itself is tiny as the article implies...
Then maybe a future in portable devices?
Surely early adopters will pave the way to faster and bigger drives.
512 GB per sq inch media, but what size is the drive and much will it cost?
Again! Each time they say it's for real and that they will start shipping "this year". They probably meant that they will start shipping as soon as they finish testing the defragmenting capabilities of the drive.
Those would be cracks, not scratches.
Dialectician. Archology.
I've heard talks over a year ago that holographic storage was going to hold enormous amounts of re-writeable data with a awesome access/write speeds somewhere over 1.5GBps... something tells me there's not enough funding in this technology yet... If you could have a box that could read and write [an almost infinite amount of] data at amazing speeds, who needs physical hard drives or Memory? This stuff COULD change the entire "PC" as we know it...
...will we be able to synergisticly leverage our Stacked AJAX On Rails infrastructure to compound our ROI in the Enterprise ecosystem?? Huh? Huh? They think of that?
In the olden days (before I got involved in computers, thankfully), hard drives had to be periodically reformatted because the read/write head, which was directly attached to a stepper moter, and slowly became unaligned.
The introduction of magnetic coils for arm positioning, and position cues on the discs, solved that problem.
Are these drives going to face similar issues?
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
As the subject line says, I'm very very worried. I mean this from a "1984" standpoint.
We've already read stories about how our past activities on the Internet (news groups, blogs...etc) can catch up with our future in a very bad way. With storage getting cheap and more abundant, I fear that giant archives of public data will be collected daily and stored for hundreds of years...all ready to be pulled for review later. Any place, at any moment, digital video of you recorded in public can be data-mined using facial feature algorithms to track your history of where you went, when, and for how long.
While such technology will certainly be available in the UK, there is nothing against US law from preventing it happening here. Homeland Security, Patriot Act...bla bla bla. It's just a matter of time when terabytes are cents on the dollar.
Life is not for the lazy.
This sounds amazing!
I'll be installing one of these in the dashboard of my flying car later this year when they both come out.
By the way, my car runs on cold fusion.
And the in-dash computer plays Duke Nukem Forever.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
That is, how much per square inch, single layer? And just how many layers does this employ?
Here's a brilliant idea: Maybe somewhere in the summary, Slashdot could include an easy way to get more information about the story... say, with a hyperlink to a webpage. Then people would have an easy way to find answers to questions they may have that aren't covered by the one paragraph summary. For instance, people could then read the news article that mentions that "In this demonstration there were over 1.3 million bits per data page, and 320 data pages spaced 0.067 degrees apart were stored in the same volume of material.".
digital video of you recorded in public can be data-mined using facial feature algorithms
That's why i always wear my tinfoil sombrero in public.
230 GB/in2 would be enough to make an 8 TB 3.5" drive. As it is, they're only hoping for a mere 8 Tb drive.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
If this technology is based on storing data "below the top layer", then it won't be possible to mass produce this technology with "pressings" like with CD's, correct?
Well, I bet someone just wrote their last public release for that company....
Who advertises transfer rates in bytes/sec??? After all, it would be much more impressive to state their drive transfers 200 megabits/sec... They could even ambigiously just write "mb' to further stun readers...
And I wonder if "mega" here means 2^20 or 10^6. The latter is an often-used cheap way of increasing statistics by 5%....
That's less than 3x the cable speed. Will definitely need to improve on transfer speeds, or else when the internet where capacity is limitless and takes up no space at all, will look much more appealing.
HD Trailers
something will knock them in the head and they'll realise that they can not only make huge disks the majority of consumers can't fill (yet) but they can also make smaller disks... :P
Backups themselves do not need a a fast performing medium. The 20 MBps speed of these disks will be fine for use in backup systems. Its ability to store vast amounts of data is where it will shine in this area.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This just in: InPhase releases Yet Another Press Release and promises to ship something Real Soon Now.
No sig today...
I agree with you in that I would love to have non movable storage technology. Althouth if I RC Zip disks were similar to hard disks or floppies (with plates and all that). We really need solid state no volatile memory. Although currently this technology exists it is quite expensive compared to hard disks, and I really doubt it will become cheaper than optical media.
Hopefuly the memory will become cheap enough to replace current hard disks and the read/write limits will be extended.
Have you thought that, the hard disk technology we use in computers is at least 40 years old? according to Wikipedia the first hard disk was used in 1955!!. I think it is time to change this media.
If someone knows better please correct me but, I remember from my junior high courses in electronic that there is something called NAND gates circuit which state can be changed with an electronic pulse and it is persistent (no electricity required after that). IIRC CPU cache memory is made of that and thus it is really fast. One of the downsides is that memory was a bit expensive.
I believe that this kind of memory could be used to make hybrid drives, with some intelligent mechanisms (at drive level) that can make the disk faster. I believe it already exists (as hard disk buffer) but I believe memory should not be volatile.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
So
is this going to be the winner in the BLU-RAY vs HD-DVD race
We are Dead Stars looking back Up at the Sky
My worry about all this ever increasing storage capacity is the fact that affordable, non-disk based backup systems don't appear to be evolving at the same rate. So, we're in a situation that a full disk backup might span 100 dual layer DVDs, which is a hell of an undertaking. Sure, Blu-Ray and HD DVD might help, but at best estimates they're still lagging a long way back.
As we start using and creating more and more media rich content on our machines, it's going to start getting *very* tricky to ensure that content is backed up, and I suspect a lot of us simply won't bother.
Also, doesn't packing higher densities of data together make it more prone to corruption/problems, and even if it isn't more prone, surely we're going to end up with incredibly large 'baskets' into which we place all of our valuable 'eggs'?
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but it's something I've been worried about for some time - and having a machine with ~700Gb storage at present (most of that free space for now) I worry about how I can safely back this stuff up without buying yet another hard disk. I prefer to spread my risk over different media types - CD/DVD/Hard Disks/Online Solutions - but other than big hard disks, none of the others have evolved anywhere near quickly enough to accommodate these huge capacity drives...
Worrysome John
Hey Paul! Paul Moller?? Is that you? How's your Skycar coming along? Saw your stuff on www.moller.com, amazing!
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
Well I sort of agree with you about solid state storage but there are a few flaws in your logic.
I will answer with a question. Why do people or organisations backup their data?
Most PC uses may backup their data to floppy (now obsolete) or to zip (getting obsolete) or CD or DVD but rarely to tape because it is not cheap and it is inconvenient.
Most organisation backup their data (from a few 10's of GB to 1000's of TB) mainly with tape devices (super DLT's can save approx 400 to 600 GB per tape) with approx 50MB/sec through put. This solution can be very expensive ($10k to $100M). Solid state storage can do this but the cost would get quite expensive. Even disk storage would be cheaper than solid state however any company that wants to stay in business should have a Disaster Recovery Program for their IT department and this means off-site storage of backup media.
Government organisation (ie. Tax Department) require data retention for seven years and some even longer. Now solid state and even disk backups become so expensive you need to have the budget of NASA for even a small company. If the company requires off-site backups then at the moment tapes are the only solution.
What is important here is the potential of the Holographic Versatile Disk (HVD). They are starting with 300GB @ 20MB/sec and assuming the writers/readers are say $2k each (guessing here but reasonable) you could get a multi-stacker silo (say 6 heads and 50 disks) for say $20k that would have a through-put of 120MB/s which would be fine for small to medium sized companies. An equivalent tape machine would cost close to $50 and up depending on your tape silo and not only would it would be much larger it would have a slower response for the robot stacker.
Assuming a HVD multi-stacker library of similar performance to it's tape/cartridge equivalent the overall cost now comes down to the media and I am quite sure HVD disks will be at least 10 to 20 times cheaper than the equivalent tape/cartridge. Coupled with that will be the potential longer life and small storage area of the HVD, not to mention "near-line recovery" capabilities.
What we are seeing with HVD is a change away from tape backup units and anyone who has worked in this area will welcome that.
On an interesting note. It looks like the VHS tape recorders are being phased out by HD and/or DVD recorders. I am sure the same will happen when HVD are pushed as the new backup strategy. Think thin DVD's (even in a protective case) compared to bulky VHS cassettes.
Note: You should not compare CD's, DVD, HD-DVD and BluRay with HVD since they are aimed at different areas of IT, however that is a subject for another day.
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
it was done by marketing!
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
so what have you got to hide eh? hmm
Sounds like marketing speak to me. Why not just call it 500g and call it a day?
It also sounds rather low for true holographic technology. we proved ( all the way back in highschool ) that truly massive densities are possible, without *any* moving parts. How? well, i cant tell you that since its under development...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
What respectable holographic storage is measured in square inches?
Where's my data cube?
The initial InPhase Tapestry(TM) holographic recording device will record 300 gigabytes (GB) of data onto a 130 mm disc with a transfer rate of 20 megabytes per second (MB/s).
TFA says:
Density depends on the number of pixels/bits in a page of data, the number of pages stored in a particular volumetric location, the dynamic range of the recording material, the thickness of the material, and the wavelength of the recording laser.
I'm confused. The technology is supposed to be taking advantage of the entire volume, why do they measure effectiveness in data bits per square inches, and not cubic ones?
In theory, the technology is extremely scalable because on any given data location, multiple instances of data are stored in a grid, and numerous different instances of these grids can be stored at varying angles! This is the magic of holograms, the benefit over single-point optical storage. This is the same reason why holograms we see in everyday life, such as the "Genuine" sticker on Microsoft licenses, have different versions of an image (or even different images altogether) when viewed from varying angles.
This is a completely different class of storage in my opinion. There are many components in this system that are common to other devices at least to some degree, such as digital cameras and LCD's, just on a different scale, so as those technologies continue to advance, so will holographic storage.
300GB + 20MB/s is just the tip of the iceberg, my friends... and it's nice to see that this iceberg is forming from what I once considered vaporware.
I recall IBM had developed a crystal-based holo drive, which could operate like a hard drive, and was cube-like, rather than a rotating disc, though I didn't learn much more about it. Absolutely no moving parts either, from what I remember.
-@
Move all sig!
Boy, am I old!
Angleyne: You can't bend that girder - it's unbendable! Bender: Well I don't know anything about lifting, so that ju
20 MBPs? That is really really really weak for any kind of enterprise level...even for backing up files that is weak....At 1.6 TB it would take a HELL of a long time to back-up all that data....generally companies, when they backup, want to be able to do it nightly within an hour or two. Obviously live back-ups can occur, but that is not as neat.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
The official press release
It answers a lot of questions that people have been having. It is 0.5 Terabit per square inch... it is 20 Megabyte per second transfer rate.. etc.
"The two most abundant elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity." -Harlan Ellison
How would you get it there?
...
To:
Holographic Storage
3326244-5336796 Computer Drive
Block 3250
[x] Return Receipt Requested
...the power of the future, and always will be.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
optical media that gets scratched up to the point of data loss within weeks of normal use.
Where do you work, in a sandblasting shop? I've got data CD's that have survived 14+ years with no discernable data loss -- because I keep them safe in their jewelboxes when not in use.
I really wish we had gone with Zip style disks
About eight years ago, a Jaz cartridge cost $0.10/MB, and a CD-R cost under $0.01/MB. It's not hard to see why the latter won out.
If the target of this is tape replacement, it is going to fail. 20MB/sec is simply a pathetic transfer rate. That would have been decent 4 years ago (if the drive had built-in compression), but not now, at least for backup.
I see this as the logical successor to magneto-optical drives, which were common in "near-line" storage applications. However, their capacities never caught up and they were completely demolished when ATA/SATA arrays became viable. If you stick one of these things in an automated library, it could run neck-and-neck with SATA applications for short-term archival applications where capacity is more important than response time, but response time DOES need to be a better than what can be done with tape. The most common use of MO drives in my experience was short-term (1 yr. or so) medical image archiving. However, every shop I have seen nowadays that has one of those things is just using it until the service contract runs out and replacing it with a SATA array.
Before this particular product is going to happen though, I think they are going to need to figure out a way to make that thing smaller.
SirWired
Are they calculating the Terabyte as SI TB=10^12 (wrong but popular in big number crazy america) or as the IEC 60027-2 TiB=2^40.
The diffrence for the impatent is approx 92.5 GiB
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SI_prefix#Computing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEC_60027-2
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tebibyte
With storage getting cheap and more abundant, I fear that giant archives of public data will be collected daily and stored for hundreds of years...all ready to be pulled for review later.
:(
I don't fear that... not for "hundreds of years" at least. For 20 years, yes, I do fear that.
Talk to NASA about long-term data storage. They had magnetic tapes from the Apollo program that have decayed such that the data is no longer retrievable, a combination of tape and reader problems. NASA spent a fair amount of money trying to move data from these tapes to something new in the mid 1990s. They were only partially successful.
Government organizations have the same problems that home consumers have with storage of large amounts of data. (Just the definition of "large" changes.) It's only good for as long as the specific storage media you use, and the reader for that thing, lasts. When you have to move it to the next amazing storage media, you find just how big a problem you've set up for yourself.
For the life of the media/reader, I'm worried about this. For most of these things, that seems to run in the 5-20 year range, depending on how well it is stored. Past that? They'll have the same problem as I have with the 3-1/2 inch magneto-optical disks I have at home. No way to read them, and no money at the time the drive failed to buy a replacement to move them to the next best thing, which at the time was CD-Rs, and which would have had to be moved to DVD-R by now.
Long-term digital data storage is simply not a solved problem. And as a photographer that shoots purely digital, that concerns me a lot. As a citizen concerned with government programs like you fear, I find that vaguely reassuring.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is... Oops. Frank, I've got your sig again! Where's mine?
Maybe this will allow me to make a copy of my entire life experience and put it on disk. Then I can make a mint by selling copies! Could this be the start of true reality shows??
I'll bet these first "300GB" drives are really just NORMAL hard drives with some neon paint in order to raise money for the rest of the R&D to make a real holigraphic drive. Otherwise why are they starting off with such a small capacity drive when they have such great technology?
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
I want a real solution to back up my server without using HDDs/D2D for backups.
I'm paranoid, I backup in DVD as well, which resulted in 300 DVDs and I think I will never do it again since it was a pain and time comsuming to do.
I did as well read a similar story about Holo-Storage a while back, I think they called the media "Holographic versatile disc" something like that, the media looked exactly like a DVD.
In other words I want a data cube for back-ups now! Disc shape media is so 90s.
NCR utilized Holo stor memory in its POS cashier machines as non-volatile protected memory for catastrophic events. It protected the loss of transaction record in the event of power loss and provided the ability to pickup transactions right where they left off when power was restored. This in the 1980's as delivering product, precedes the boys making a commodity drive mechanism by decades.
Just used the search function of slashdot, last year they said they'd release it this year too. SO their dates are still consistent.
Hmmm... Pie...
300GB ought to be enough for anybody.
I watched the two marketing videos and read some of the website, but didnt see any mention of the ability to rewrite data or how shock resistant the hardware or media are. Did I miss this information?