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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.'"
I suggest you read Slashdot
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.
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
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
Erm... doesn't Holographic imply three dimensions? Wouldn't it be cubic inch?
"42"
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.
We were supposed to have 100GB CD's 5 years ago.
Problem is that DRM happened....
GCS/S d-x s+(+): a C++++$ UL+$ P+ L++$ !E--- W++@ N++>$ !o !K-- w++$ !O !M !V PS++>$ PE !Y PGP+ t+ 5++ X++ R tv b
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.
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"
No. Moving. Parts.
The comment... not funny.
The +1 interesting mod... funny.
The funny thing is, it's the porn industry that is the first to ship things in new formats. While *I* wouldn't mod the above comment as interesting, it stands to reason that good quality porn was the reason many bought into 16mm, super8, beta/vhs, and DVD.
So yes, a mod likely has a porn collection that spans so many DVDs they would very much enjoy a new space saving format that is equal or better in quality... for their HDTV cum shots, and 60 inch projection vaginas.
I better go AC.
Less than a square inch, but it's five feet high!
No sooner do I get over one, then you put a better one right next to me. Bastards.
I'm not going to speculate on your reliability questions, but I have to wonder, other than HDDs, what other affordable storage medium is there for several hundred GBs for SOHO or personal use.
For these purposes DVDs are less and less practical (reliability, access speed, finding the DVD the data was written to). Tape back ups are less practical and for personal use are a more expensive solution (the hardware cost anyways). I have a pile of DVDs and most are just duplicates of the same data for redundancy.
Fine Blueray and HD-DVD are coming out, soon. But there's uncertainty of the standard. And it suffers the same problem as DVD. Ditto probably for Holographic. And who knows how reliable it will be.
Is the best way just to buy two different HDDs from different manufacturers (to avoid a defective batch) and put them in a not always on external caddy the best solution? Is there a working consortium working on this problem? Or is there a forthcoming technology that promises to deliver (we've all heard that right??)
Keep in mind that the summar is completely wrong. By a factor of 8. The drive is not half a terabyte, it's half a terabit. There's a difference. Same thing with the transfer speeds. It's no wonder that the general population is confused about storage space when a slashdot article gets it flat out wrong.
You do realise that the majority of the world's population (over 70%) has access to electricity, even in the third world, and the remaining percentage that doesn't is shrinking fairly quickly (e.g. a few decades) due to rapid growth?
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
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.
Personally I think there's a lot of problems with media storage today. There's no real 'built-in' longevity in anything. Look at camcorders - i bought a super8 one after the ancient VHS model used to have, and since then the super8 is thrown out and and now there's like 10 different media formats for camcorders... I remember the ubiquity of vhs camcorders and wonder why those products have lost so much popularity and atribute it to the wierd and varied methods of storage.
Same thing with movies... I'm now on hiatus from buying DVDs because of impending HD-DVD and Blueray. Like wtf, first i bought into the whole 'long term' and archival modality of the DVD and now I find out DVD quality 'sucks' cause it's just 420lines and there's 1080 out there but only if you have the right media.
Sooner or later a medium will have to come out that has sufficient capacity to last long term. I doubt (like i did when DVD came out) that 'better' quality than 1080 will be released for movies (i'll prolly get owned by 3d movies shot with multiple cameras or sumtin), and ideally eventually we will be using personal camcorders that can record several hours of similarly 1080 quality video in a conveniently portable package.
I weep for libraries that have to deal with constantly changing formats of archiving data.... In the end I susepect everything will end up on hardrives since all the rest of the storage mechanisms keep getting changed and upgraded. Hell i have ALL my media on my computer now cause it's the only thing that guarantees me logevity, cause DVDs can get scratched and broken where a redundant array can last....