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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.'"
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
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...
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"
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?
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.
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 $66, and fall to nothing. I believed before and it cost me a decent amount of money.
Holographic media has been a scam before and it'll be one until there is a box with a price tag in a store. Even then, I would be cautious about buying it.
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."
...or whatever the exact quote is, as I couldn't find a reliable source for it.
~ Andrew Tanenbaum
We were supposed to have 100GB CD's 5 years ago.
Problem is that DRM happened....
GCS/S d-x s+(+): a C++++$ 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.
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
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"
No. Moving. Parts.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Holographic model of Data Storage isn't really that "un-tested". While we might not know how it works (the under-the-hood understanding of it) -- we knmow that it does -- the Human Brain stores memory in a holographic model (read the Holographic model of the brain as proposed by Dr. Karl Pribram) and infact a renowned physicist by the name of David Bohm suggested such a medium for the whole of the universe itself. But that aside -- the beauty of a hologram is in it's ability to retain all of the data it stores even though the physical medium itself might be disrupted/reduced somehow. IIRC, the concept goes like this -- you can cut a hologram into smaller pieces -- but each of these would retain the whole image. There is possibly a certain level of "differentiation" that needs to happen before the validity of the data gets compromised...
I think it's just the new higher 'resolution' technology that's presently limited to 20MB/s.
The older stuff that got something like 200G/in^2 had a much faster transfer rate, but lower density.
It's all due to the electronic end, really. The laser picks up the data at 1G/s, but the electronics take much longer to send it out to whatever bus reads it.
110100 1101000 1101000 1100110 0 1101111 1101000 1100011 1
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
I can fit 515GB in a square inch.
As long as you let me stack my 1 square inch black and white tiles high enough...
*fetches ladder*
Every rule has an exception. Except this one. Oh bugger...
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.
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
It's not a HDD replacement. It's a CD/DVD replacement. So imagine something that looks like a floppy disc holding 300G of data.
Also remember that this is the first product to use this technology. In a few years we will look back on this and think about how amazingly slow it is, and how slow it is.
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
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
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
What respectable holographic storage is measured in square inches?
Where's my data cube?
So you're saying that the Human Brain stores all of its memory as an interference pattern of two lasers? I've heard of sharks with lasers attached to their heads, but humans? Interesting.
"Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised."
-Marilyn Manson
That's why holohraphic storage doesn't hang. It lingers.
Defining Statistics and Social Research
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.