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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
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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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Give it a few years... 11 dimensional storage. Oh yes.
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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1Tb / 1 in. This holographi stoage is nowhere near as good as millipede.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Millipede
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.
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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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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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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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
Well for Cds, DVDs, HD-DVD, & Blue-Ray it is all about one single laser beam that doesn't get split.
With Holographic memory it is a question of a beam being split then both beams being pointed to the same spot. So to be Holographic memory you need the beam to be split then to hit the same point at different angles.
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!
Holography is about more than just using 3 dimensions of space to store something. It's specifically about a technique that involves generating an interference pattern between a coherent source of light split into two crossing beams. By that nature, it stores data in 3d. CD type optical storage is still a surface storage medium even with multiple layers. It just focuses the beam onto different surfaces.
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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