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."

Comments

I don't want a disc 1cm larger than a CD!!!

[hummassa]

I want a disc with 1cm radius TOPS, with 4G+ of storage.

1 CM larger?

[insanarchist]

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

Re:1 CM larger?

[Sj0]

First you make it work, THEN you make it small.

If you try to get a new technology to exit the birthing process completely ready to sell, you're going to overwhelm your poor engineers.

A backup solution

[laffer1]

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.

Re:A backup solution

[stubear]

I was going to say the same thing. Storage isn't the problem these days, backing up extremely large hard drives or RAID arrays is. Not only that but access speeds are really becoming the greater bottleneck. Scanning through 100GB of photos can take a little while. I'd like to see companies work on faster indexing and file management. Microsoft, give us back the unified file storage in Vista damnit.

Re:A backup solution

[roystgnr]

Well CD-rs and DVD-r have upwards of 4-8 years and counting for life. Those people that claim 1-2 years, they are full of shit.

Or they've just bought the wrong batches of media. I have some CD-Rs (Memorex) that I burned in 1997 which are still perfectly readable. I have some other CD-Rs (a PNY spindle, I think) that started to show unrecoverable errors within months. Maybe some brand names are cheaper than others, but I've also had good discs from PNY, and I wouldn't be surprised if other people have encountered bad Memorexes.

Sometimes when other people say something that sounds "full of shit", the problem is actually just that you think you know everything, and you're wrong.

Re:Well, how many dimensions do we have to work wi

[radarsat1]

Hm, too bad 7 of those dimensions will only fit one Planck-size bit each.. ;-)

"How" is Largely Irrelevant.

[webword]

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.

Re:"How" is Largely Irrelevant.

[Anonymous Coward]

You might be on the wrong website, then.