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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."
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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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.
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.
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.
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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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.
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
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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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.