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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."
The disc is thicker and might damage an ordinary cd/dvd drive if it is inserted by mistake. The larger diameter prevents this.
Did you read the article?
It says at the end that the consumer version they are looking at would most likely be the size of a postage stamp and have 75G to 100G of storage.
Ok, I've now googled around a bit and found this. Given that it is from a Philips server, it should be a reliable source. Seems what I've heared was not entirely correct, but also not entirely wrong either :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Blu-ray is going to top out at 200GB, not 50GB link: http://www.engadget.com/2006/04/28/tdk-ok-were-don e-with-the-200gb-recordable-blu-ray/
:)
and its the same size as a traditional CD
I fear the Y2038 bug
On Inphase's web site they have a PDF file with details on their media.
/ download/DataSheet_MEDIA.pdf
http://www.inphase-tech.com/products/professional
You don't have to worry about inserting it into an ordinary CD/DVD drives because it's in a 135x153x11 mm cartridge. This is exactly the same dimensions of existing MO cartridges. I suppose one could cram one of their holo-cartridges into a MO drive or maybe if one had one of those ancient CD-ROMs that used a caddy...
I like this from the PDF: "Recording Format: Phase Conjugate Polytopic Holographic". Not sure what that means, exactly, but it sounds cool.
Iz
9cm dia. disc with 400GB (assuming 1cm dia. spindle) = 400G / (63.61-0.79) cm^2 = 6.37G / cm^2
2.5cm dia. disc (assuming 0.5cm dia. spindle) = (4.91-0.2)cm^2*6.37(G/cm^2)=30.0027G
Damned good math there, man. Kudos.
And if I can get it in rewritable, all the better.
110100 1101000 1101000 1100110 0 1101111 1101000 1100011 1
I am not aware of any period of time in the last 20 years in which the capacity of at least one tape format has not exceeded the capacity of the largest hard drive on the market. Right now I have a Quantum DLT-S4 library at work, which is 800GB native capacity per tape. The largest hard drive I can buy is a 750GB Seagate.