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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 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.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
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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Not to mention the fact that one of the reasons CDs/DVDs are the size they are (12cm) because it's the widest that can fit in a standard 5 1/4" drive bay (about 14.5cm) with enough space left at the sides for a tray open/close mechanism. These new disks are the same size as a 5 1/4" disk (13cm), which leaves just enough space at the side for guide mechanisms. So we're going to have to push these disks in like floppies. Hope they're not susceptible to scratching.
For example, my main concern with this new storage is that it will hold a ton, but will still only have the couple year shelf-life that DVD-Rs and CD-Rs have.
As storage space increases but shelf-life lags behind, it becomes increasingly riskier to actually use that full amount of space because you're basically putting more of your chickens in one basket.
Does anybody know of any current developments that are working to solve this issue? Is having a home server the best way to reliably store all those old CD-Rs?
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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.
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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