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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
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
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?
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.
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.
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