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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.""
What kind of library has £9000 to spend on a single piece of computer hardware? It'd be substantially cheaper to buy a computer and four of those 1 TB hardisks that were mentioned yesterday, and they'd be rewritable!
Or they could spent the £9000 on, y'know, say... books.
FGD 135
for a high density archival format, but I can't see where this even comes close.
The manufacturer rates it at 50 year archival life, with no specifics about how that number was derived (is that an average? guaranteed for every piece of media? until an error rate of "x" is encountered? under what storage conditions?).
It's a proprietary solution, from a single startup company - what are the odds that a reader is going to exist in 50 years? Note that the manufacturer specifically warns of a lack of backward compatibility when they state "Drive is backward read compatible for three generations; 18-24 months between generations." Having an archive of data which is inaccessible doesn't get you much.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Its a brand new technology, which means that the initial models have to absorb or get allocated a lot of the development costs, and therefore the price restricts the models for only those who can afford it and have a genuine need for it.
I agree with the parent on this. At least it's not vapourware.
Always the same debate with new technologies, especially storage - too expensive, something else is better etc. etc. Goes all the way back to floppy disks vs. ethernet. The first hard drives were around 20Mb, and cost a lot more than the 15 or so floppies they replaced.
What would be great is if someone knowledgeable had a look at the technology and made an educated guess as to whether it will be cheap in mass production. I'm pretty sure the first CDR disks weren't cheap. Tapes still aren't that cheap given their simplicity and speed. A far more useful analysis would be whether this technology could be made cheap when mass produced. If it can then it is a contender, if not then it's a waste of time.
Longevity - reliably is still a To be determined
look at how long it took other media Manufactures to admit a finite and shorter life of their products.
Who would have ever though that magnetic media would ever last longer than optical media ?
but it's a fact today .
With ten years experience working with enterprise class mission critical systems, I've seen those arguments (and those systems) many times. And yet in my experience, the 'rated uptimes' seem to be some definition of 'when the system is up and working the uptime will be 6 9's', because between everything from bugs through randomly incompatible hardware through firmware upgrades through operator (yes, the vendors own certified technicians) error, the actual on-line time for that kind of system usually isnt even close to the standalone COTS systems we have.
That rather jives with the recent article here on slashdot on MTBF of consumer grade v.s enterprise grade disks. Turns out the consumer disks MTBF was actually accurate, and the enterprise grade MTBF was in reality the same as the consumer grade, despite being stated as being twice as much.
And dont even get me started on disk subsystem based remote copy software. If you really need it because there is no other way to create offsite redundancy then so many system design errors have been made that the software is more or less impossible to secure and should be scrapped and redesigned from scratch. Which I'd venture is why they charge so much for it.
"When the cost of not having a backup restored for 1 hour can be in 7 figures, never mind if its down for a day, then 18k for a drive is pocket change."
When all the 18k buys you is a lot of salesman 'enterprise grade' bullshit, barely tested hardware ('expensive' has a fair overlap with 'exclusive', which surprisingly often means you're going to be the one to run into the bugs) and no guarantees that will even get you an apology when the system fails, you're better off spending those 18K on 18 times the redundancy which would give you a vastly higher real availability for the same money.
If it's data I actually care about I'll go for many eyeballs, low price and high redundancy every time these days. Promises from vendors dont get your data back when they screw up.