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Holographic Storage Slated to Hit Market This Fall
prostoalex writes "The Guardian takes a look at the current developments in the world of holographic storage. Despite being available in research for over 40 years, the technology is getting commercialized only now, with InPhase Technologies launching its 600 GB write-once disk and a drive this fall. What avout the price? "The first holographic products are certainly not mass-market — a 600GB disc will cost around $180 (£90), and the drive costs about $18,000. Potential users include banks, libraries, government agencies and corporations.""
The benefits for write-once media are actually pretty clear. Suppose you've got to keep audit trails for a database containing financial data; writing it to write-once media is a pretty good way of doing it, since it's then easy to show that it wasn't tampered with. Rewritable media is useful for other things (e.g. live data).
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
Holographic storage offers extremely fast data transfer rates - currently up to 160Mbit/sec, though there are plans to increase this...speed trumps price just about every time.
I could be wrong, but are you implying that people will use this because it's got 160Mbit/sec write time? Keep in mind that this is 20MB/sec. That's a little low for the standard harddrive, and you can increase it by adding more drives in a sequential raid.
If that's the speed, then it absolutely isn't a good reason to use this.
The only advantage this actually has is information density. One 600GB disc is going to be pretty tiny compared to an array of harddrives designed to get the speed up.
Is that worth it for a library or bank? My inclination would be no. A couple hundred harddrives in a SAN is probably a better idea.
The market will be those individuals that absolutely, positively need the discs to be tiny, and nothing else matters. Because this tech isn't going to do anything else better than what we've already got.
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2) Transfer speed
3) (600 gigabytes) / (600 megabytes) = 1 024 times better
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
"speed trumps price just about every time."
Of course, you can build a multiterabyte disk-to-disk backup system with gigabit transferrates out of common of the shelf hardware for less than $1000.
The cost of having backups can certainly be made a lot less than $18000.
However, what ar the odds that the dataset you produce will make sense in the given context?
Very high, actually. Presuming I have the original data to provide context, I can fiddle with white space, unallocated disk blocks, executables (since they are not likely to be executed from backup nor examined closely), whatever. Without the original data, then all bets are off. You have to assume an attcker would have access to the data in question.
Cryptoanalysis of SHA1 has already weakened it...
Good post. Except that LTO3 can store 400GB and LTO4 can store 800GB.