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Holographic Storage a Reality in 2006?
vitaly.friedman writes "What do you do when you're getting close to the limits of 2-dimensional optical technology? Well, how many dimensions do we have to work with?" From the Ars Technica article: "How much greater data density? In the Hitachi Maxell device, a single disc about 1 cm larger in diameter than a CD will buy you 300GB. By way of contrast, HD-DVD currently offers a maximum of 30GB on a 2-layer disc, and Blu-ray tops out at 50GB. Although upgrades are in the works that promise to increase the capacity of both of those formats, even the most pie-in-the-sky predictions fall short of what is planned for merely the first commercial generation of holographic storage. Future plans for that medium include boosting the capacity to 800GB in two years, and 1.6TB per disc by 2010."
I want a disc with 1cm radius TOPS, with 4G+ of storage.
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Wouldn't it make sense to keep it the same size so they can still use existing cd cases & so we don't have to buy new CD racks/holders? I mean, what's an extra ~50GB between friends? :p
From the look of it, there won't be affordable writers for home use. So what's left? Another huge storage medium which could hold a lossless movie? But uh oh, MPAA must be spinning at the thought of this. At most we will see $LAME_MOVIE_SERIES all on one disc so you can be milked for cash once again.
your entire pr0n collection
Finally, some progress on a real backup solution. Backup storage has not kept up with hard drives. It would be nice to be able to backup one of the new seagate disks with 1 or 2 discs. When you consider businesses have terabytes of data now this is still a floppy in terms of capacity. Its a great start though.
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1.6TB per disc? Nice, a cakebox of those, and I can have a backup of all of my pr0n :D
Who wants Yet Another Disc Format? Actually, this would fine and great for server backup solutions, but not really for consumer-level stuff like music and videos.
Obviously you, sir, are not a true collector of the fine arts...
So soon it get's forgotten forever, why do these people waste their and our time with such incompatible media?
Do they really think we pick it up?
Dream on Hitachi / Maxell...
Give it a few years... 11 dimensional storage. Oh yes.
Don't get too excited, though. First generation systems tend to be expensive--on the order of US$15,000 for the reader/writer and between US$120-$180 for the discs.
120x50 = 6 grand.
unless you are a real coinesseur no pron can be worth that much.
perpetually dwelling in the -1 pits
i agree with dredson, server backup yes but not on a commercial user level, my opinnion.
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I don't want a disc. I want something small we're able to use in smaller portable devices, something where the medium doesn't need to move.
I want a cube. I want a cube about 1cm^3 in size. If that's too thick, a 2x1x0.5cm sliver is OK. Preferably translucent moss green, but other colors are of course also acceptable as long as they've appeared for futuristic storage in at least one reputable sci-fi movie.
To be slightly serious, there's non-aesthetic reasons for this as well. With optical storage it's much faster to move the beam around than the media, and with rotating media your seek and read times alike are limited by the rotation speed.
But mostly I just want a translucent green block because it's cool. Bonus points if there's a small LED inside making it glow.
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Doesn't toshiba have a prototype of a Blu-ray with 6 layers and 200GB storage already? How many layers does it take to be considered 3D or holographic?
I want holographic displays!
TLF
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
1Tb / 1 in. This holographi stoage is nowhere near as good as millipede.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Millipede
Holographic memory... Will these be read in WORM drives?
(ducks)
Hm, too bad 7 of those dimensions will only fit one Planck-size bit each.. ;-)
Great. So when you slide your disc into the drive it spontaneously crosses the Einstein-Rosen bridge and ends up in an alternate reality.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
11 dimensional storage... absolutely! What better back up for a quantum computer? A string theory-based storage solution! MC Hawking will be popping wheelies over this!
That much storage on a standard size disk I would be afraid to touch it! A pin head scratch and you just lost 20 Gigs of Info.
Its interesting how some tech predictions can be so wildly wrong. I read some advice in a magazine about 9 or 10 years ago which read something like this - "Don't buy a DVD-R drive, within a year or so they'll be replaced by holographic storage". I waited, but it just never came. Holographic storage has been just on the horizon for so long and never materialized, so its really great that a workable solution has been developed for technology with such promise. A little late, but better than not at all.
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"How much greater data density? In the Hitachi Maxell device, a single disc about 1cm larger in diameter than a CD will buy you 300GB. By way of contrast, HD-DVD currently offers a maximum of 30GB on a 2-layer disc, and Blu-ray tops out at 50GB. Although upgrades are in the works that promise to increase the capacity of both of those formats, even the most pie-in-the-sky predictions fall short of what is planned for merely the first commercial generation of holographic storage. Future plans for that medium include boosting the capacity to 800GB in two years, and 1.6TB per disc by 2010."
Yeah but what's that in Libaries of Congress? Or how many Volkswagons can it hold?
As I understand it, these discs are meant almost exclusively for backup and storage purposes. The thing about HDDVDs and BVDs are that you can press them in a production line for a few cents, while these things are a little more complicated.
Why do these discs have to rotate? How about rotating just the spindle, inside the hub, directing the read/write laser? The reference laser for interference can shine from a fiber around the circumference, or from one side or the other. Rotating the disc is a waste of energy and time.
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This is the break they have been waiting for. Maybe it will fit on a disk now!
Personally, I don't care how my data is stored. It can be holographic, electromagnetic, or paper-click-o-matic. I care about how much I can store. I want it secure and I want it instantly available. Getting excited about "holographic" is pretty much a waste of time. Just tell me how much I can store, tell me how it can be (easily) set up and secured, and how much it is going to cost. After that, I'm just hearing 01010100101010. No thanks.
By the way, I recently found out about the Data Storage Industry Wiki. From a business perspective, this is pretty cool. They talk about trends and big picture stuff, and there are many good links to useful resources and smart people. Good stuff; relevant.
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For one reason, it means you have to go out and buy more stuff... Its all about the money.
A practical might be to prevent you from shoving the wrong disk in the wrong machine.
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I have a hard enough time keeping track of my cd's ... as if I won't lose something the size of a quarter.
"What's the use of a good quotation if you can't change it?" - Doctor Who
The one issue of course is whether they read/write like traditional burners, from the inside to the outside. Anybody know whether these do that or not?
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Media that travels through time. Does that mean if I put work on it, and leave it in the disc drive for a while, it would come out complete?
If so, I need some of this!
A HVD disc will cost about $100.
A HVD reader/writer will cost about $10000.
1 cm larger than a CD/DVD sucks. Then it dont fit in standard jewel case boxes, it don't fit in current CD towers, and the device probably wouldn't fit in a 5½ drive bay in the computer chassi. Changing the form factor is a bad idea, changing the form factor to a larger form is an even worse idea!
They have come up with a disc that will be hard to make a drive for that will fit in a standard drive bay. Why not shave off 1 cm making the disk only 250GB but fit in with every computer in the world.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
I hope you meant BDs (Blu-ray Disc), not underwear.
I was referring to the Sliders series, where Quinn said "I've crossed the Einstein-Rosen bridge."
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
...I hate to be a pedant, but are you sure it would fit in EVERY computer in the world? What about the ones without 5 1/4" drive bays? :-)
But you could ALSO decrease the size of the laser and motor that reads/writes the disk. Thus you would have your 1.6tB (which I can't imagine anyone in the world needing, unless they're a system administrator or Bill Gates) AND it would fit into a 5 1/4" drive bay.
Those using pirated Tinysoft signatures(TM) are a real threat to society and should all be thrown in jail.
I have a belt bag for my Nintendo DS. I keep six GBA games on the side pocket. GBA games are small enough, yet not too small, easy enough to handle. But currently, I'm keeping one Nintendo DS game in the console itself and keeping the others in my bag in the retail packages. DS games are much smaller than GBA games. I keep worried that I might lose them. I'm trying to come up with a decent, safe enough solution. (Let's see if I can find my old wallet that had all those pockets, that ought to do the trick...) I always get the same sort of worries with memory cards, SIM cards, etc...
The point is, the smaller the storage media comes, the easier it is to lose.
I'm all for 1 cm disks, as long as they come with a caddy that is half the size of a 3.5" floppy.
Techno-blog editor one: What time is it?
Techno-blog editor two: Time for another Holographic Storage article!
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I suggest a moratorium on Holographic Storage articles until some device is actually shipping from the factory floor!
What's this nonsense about 2D? Well, in my world a dual layer would be 3D. Why insist on that this is new? It's better, yes, but it's essentially only more layers.
Yohoo for more layers, BTW!!!
... bought my first CD-ROM-Drive more than 10 years ago.
A cool _and_ cheap storage system with small size medias
with about the size of a MiniDisc or 8 cm CD-ROM. Maybe in a
caddy for best protection.
Small medias, easy to transport, fitting easily in the pockets
of your jacket.
Small devices (maybe without a rotating media), consuming low power,
ideal for subnotebooks or fitting in a 3.5"-bay in your desktop computer,
to replace the old floppy-drive.
And what's going on? From generation to generation the standard (!) size of
the medias stays at 12cm. And the memory on it doesn't increase like the
storage capacity of the harddisks, meaning that the conventional optical
medias become less usefull.
I hope the holo-medias have a chance against the existing BR/DVD/HD-DVD-consortiums
to establish the storage-solution which i demand. Would buy it, even if it would be
a few percent higher in price.
Older standards include the dimensions of the punch card, and the width of magnetic tape.
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I'm not even 30 yet, and I still remember when a 200 MB Hard Drive was the latest thing!!!
Now, if we could only increase competition in the telecommunications industry so that broadband service speeds could keep up with these other more rapidly advancing technologies
So if you just leave your media in the drive, does that count as an offsite backup?
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One of the alternatives considered for car audio before the compact disc was a system with rectangular card-like optical media, scanned linearly. The scanning was more complex but the loading was simpler.
Yes. The device then becomes a WORN drive ... Write Once, Read Never. Unless, of course, an alternate you in another dimension is simultaneously inserting his backup disc into his drive, in which case you may find a glowing purple vortex appearing over your head dropping a shiny plastic disc in your lap.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Business with terabytes of data to backup already have a solution. They're called tape drives. They have kept up with disk capacity just fine, and have more than kept up with disk speeds. The latest models can hold around a TB of data per tape after compression (the compression is done on the drive, so it doesn't bog down the CPU), and they can accept data at around 250-300MB/sec.
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Not unless you completely expect to be doing the work the hard way and are suprised to find it's already done.
Businesses do not have problems backing up their data. Any business with terabytes of data can easily afford a few grand to buy a second storage array in another city, and use it for snapshot style backups. We keep 3 years worth of daily snapshots in a datacenter in new york. Our entire building (or the entire city for that matter) could explode and our data is still fine. And we can quickly grab the file luser X deleted 17 days ago and didn't notice till now, unlike with tapes.
But the real question is what is the write speed?
I mean 300gig is nothing compared to the ~1-3TB that is meant to come from holographic disks.
why can't we get the A grade stuff on day one? why do we have to continually pay for upgrades
to things that should have been made available to us on day one?
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Arash Partow's Philosophy: Be a person who knows what they don't know, and not a person who doesn't know.
In other words, 13cm is less than 5.24 inches. So stop worrying, you can build a (probably slotloading) drive around it that will fit into your PC. They managed years ago with floppies too, well before anyone even thought about perhaps building a CD drive.
Luckily porn has a lot of built-in redundancy!
Maybe he does it in an alternate reality? That would suck, first you work hard on something, save it on the disc and realise that you saved it in the wrong dimension.
http://colossalstorage.net/home_spintronics.htm
http://colossalstorage.net/home_diskdrive.htm
http://www.colossalstorage.net/
Just as gasoline prices increase,,,,,, so does the need for world wide storage.
For every post, there is an equal and opposite re-post.
Wasn't there a third name in there in Sliders?
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I thought holographic disc storage had been done years ago, or at least last year.
It's possibly due for commercialization in 2006. (call me when I can order one for cheap) But the concept and product demos have already been done.
Sig for hire.
Hmm. 50 GB on a CD seems like a no-brainer considering what I just bought today.
I got one of those new "chocolate" cell phones. Cool. It takes a Micro-SD memory card, so I went to my local computer superstore to get one.
A one GB micro-SD memory card cost me $74.00. I'd never seen one before, and when I opened the package I was afraid the wind would blow it away. It's litterally smaller than my little fingernail and about as thick as a potato chip. A 7x7 grid of these cards would be 49 GB, and easily fit within the bounds of an ancient 1.44 MB floppy disk case. Hell, you could fit three or four layers of 7x7 grids of these things in that case.
Ok, so $3626 might be a bit pricey for a movie disk, but the technology is there. It's just a matter of price. Remember, all the features in this $149 cell phone would have cost well over $Ten Grand thirty years ago and would have required a suitcase full of hardware too.
I predict than in 20 years or less, we'll have terrabytes on disks the size of a quarter.
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http://www.trebuchet.com/ - where the past opens doors to the future.
Just make sure you don't leave it in the sunlight for too long..
Using the same processes used to certify other media, holographic media has been proven to 50 years, it DOES NOT suffer the same bit rot as CD/DVD. Hence, being able to call it archival grade. Read the papers.
http://www.inphase-tech.com/
I'll believe it when I see through it.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky probably. I was just quoting the line from memory ... it was from the pilot episode where Quinn is explaining his invention to the Professor.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Evil Spock has my pr0n collection!!!!! :(
If the next breakthrough is 4-dimensional storage, can I retrieve files I accidentally deleted a few years ago?
Or can I store things back in time, and send notes to myself 10 years ago?
To reign is to serve.
Back in the days before the Super Nintendo came out, I was in middle school and received the Nintendo Power magazine. I, honest to God, remember a holographic storage system being mentioned in connection with the upcoming Super Nintendo system. If my math is correct, that's something over 15 years worth of vaporware for this concept.
Not that it's a bad concept. Somebody just needs to put forth the effort to transform it from a lab curiosity to a practical reality.
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Typical slashdot to count dimensions in binary.
Bah, megabytes ... my first multiuser computer was a PDP-11/20 with a 64 kilobyte fixed hard drive, which I think came from our PDP-7.
:P
I upgraded the box to a PDP-11/34 to run Unix though, and chucked out the 64 KB drive since the 11/34 had spanking new RK07 drives with 2 megabyte disk packs. Pity.
That's retro.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
If anyone, ANYONE, touches my porn collection in that dimension...
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Can we have a moratorium on stories about holographic storage that aren't linked to reviews of production units?
I assume similar technology is used in write-only memory.
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"It ain't what people don't know thats get 'em in the most trouble, it's the things they know that ain't so" Will Rodgers
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Matthew
In terms of data density, it's 135x135x11 / 300GB (it's a square cartrige) or 200475mm^3 / 300GB ~ 666mm^3/GB.
Whereas the current HDD is at 102x147x26 / 750GB or 389844mm^3 / 750GB or ~519mm^3/GB, beating out the optical by ~20%
Let's not even get to the cost / GB and the tech maturity. The only advantage that the holo may hold is in transfer speed, which the article does not address. Tho iirc, the numbers from older articles on holo tech left me underwhelmed in that category as well
Also the form factor was an extremely poor choice. It's not a matter of accidentally shoving a cartridge into the DVD drive, but that most cases and drive cages will NOT have a slot of appropriate size, requiring either an custom external solution or a custom case for the entire machine to host this drive internally. Yet another cost to kill this emerging tech
The p0rn suppliers seem to be on the leading eadge of technology.
What the hell?
So much vapourware if you ask me - this holy grail has been oft-promised and never delivered. What's the point anyway? Ultrium LTO3 is *already* at 800GB (400G @ 2x compression) and every new generation from 4 through the roadmapped 6 is slated to double capacity with every iteration.
Call me a cynic but this tech is like AI - it's always "just around the corner". It will be a reality - just in time for us to fit it to starships with warpdrive technology. Believe it when you see it.
*disclaimer* - I work with LTO solutions.