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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.
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.
Not really. BluRay and HD-DVD discs can be mass produced in R/O form. This won't be a replacement for either of those technologies unless it's possible to create multi-million impression runs on an assembly line -- which it currently isn't.
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 $66, and fall to nothing. I believed before and it cost me a decent amount of money.
Holographic media has been a scam before and it'll be one until there is a box with a price tag in a store. Even then, I would be cautious about buying it.
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."
...or whatever the exact quote is, as I couldn't find a reliable source for it.
~ Andrew Tanenbaum
Comment removed based on user account deletion
There's a lot of talk about how slow it is, how it doesn't contain that much data especially compared with one of those 500 gigabyte hard drives... etc etc etc
First, this is one "plate" compared with 5 plates of the 500 gig hard drives.
Second, this is a first generation product. The first CD-Rom was incredibly slow. The first DVD-Rom was incredibly slow. The first 3.5" hard drive was incredibly slow. See a pattern? This is probably going to be marketed toward those industries that use DAT tapes. As they incur most of the initial costs, the technology will improve, densities will increase and costs will fall. Is there anyone paying 400$ 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.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
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...
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
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.