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.""

Comments

Good thinking

[niceone]

InPhase Technologies launching its 600 GB write-once disk and a drive this fall

Good thinking. I mean, if they were launching the disk without the drive (or even the other way round) it would be a lot less likely to succeed.

Re:Good thinking

[dkf]

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).

Re:Good thinking

[jimstapleton]

ever buy a CD-R? Not an -RW, just an -R.

Although, at that price, I admit, it seems exorbant, unless they expect thos things to have liftimes in the thousands of years range.

Re:Good thinking

[Eivind]

That is almost completely irrelevant.

First, you only prove that it's not been changed -after- it was written to the medium, which don't bring you much unless you verify the medium after writing it.

And you can do this with read-write media anyway, by writing a *tiny* bit of information on non-changeable media. Put an ad in the NY-time with the SHA-sum of your hard-disc, and you've got pretty good proof 5 years from now that it's been unchanged ever since.

Re:Good thinking

[drgonzo59]

With 1TB hard drives hitting the market, is it really worth spending $180 for 1 (!) optical disk and a $18k for the drive? For that money one can buy a lot of 1TB hard drives and build a RAID 0/1/5... array and have more capacity and reliability. Besides, I don't see museums or even companies running to get that drive, because if the standard goes the way of the Laserdisc then they are stuck with some exotic technology experiment and when their drive breaks there they will not be able to easily get their data back.

Re:Good thinking

[Znork]

"unless they expect thos things to have liftimes in the thousands of years range."

Of course, as the drives are likely to be around for about five years and you'll be able to find a servicable used part for a decade after that, a thousand year life time might not serve much purpose.

The trouble with that kind of 'archival media' is that once you realize you need the archive you have nothing with which to read it anyway.

You're better off carrying the data live on some form of redundant array of inexpensive devices, migrating it as storage expands and changes. And if you really need a protection against tampering store a checksum or signature on a redundant array of common inexpensive write-once devices. Like CD-R's. Or a paper printout at a public notary.

Re:Good thinking

[islanduniverse]

I think the 600Gb storage capacity is a dead giveaway...

Re:Good thinking

[fbjon]

Why is this better than CD-R media?

1) Longevity/reliability
2) Transfer speed
3) (600 gigabytes) / (600 megabytes) = 1 024 times better

Re:Good thinking

[morgan_greywolf]

ever buy a CD-R? Not an -RW, just an -R.

Yes. Do you think that CD-R and CD-RW technologies came out at the same time? CD-R technology was available several years before CD-RWs, so at that time it was CD-R or nothing.

Re:Good thinking

[pegr]

Put an ad in the NY-time with the SHA-sum of your hard-disc, and you've got pretty good proof 5 years from now that it's been unchanged ever since.
 
I don't know about that... Five years is a long time to find a hash collision. So what happens to your strategy when a weakness is announced? Do you tell your auditors that it was good enough five years ago?

Let's put it another way... You give me a SHA1 hash and five years. If the money's right, I'll give you back a dataset that matches that hash within that five years... (Point: a hash is a strong indication, but not a lock...)

Re:Good thinking

[dosquatch]

So says you.

Bleeding edge is always a ridiculous expense. The people who are willing to be there already know who they are. That you even raise this question means that you are not.

OTOH, neither am I, but that's not the point. The point is, this is the first commercial volley of a new technology, which means that a few years hence it will be cheaper with even higher data densities.

Meaning, potentially, something like the entire run of every season of every Star Trek series ever... on one disc.

Re:Good thinking

[Tuoqui]

Yeah and at $18,000 for a drive these big companies don't have to worry about people losing discs anymore because they'll be the only ones who can afford the drives to read them!

Re:Good thinking

[jabuzz]

I remember the very first DVD writer which was from Pioneer. It only did 3.95GB disks, the laser was stuffed after writting 1000 drives and the cost was 21,000GBP or over 40,000USD. Give it a few years and they will be as cheap as chips.

Re:Good thinking

[Mr. Underbridge]

Good thinking. I mean, if they were launching the disk without the drive (or even the other way round) it would be a lot less likely to succeed.

Yeah, that would be like a game company shipping a console before any games are available for it. Err...wait...

Re:Good thinking

[bloobloo]

Hash the whole file. The chance of finding a collision that would be a valid excel file (just as an example) must be vanishingly smaller still than finding a collision among the whole set of all possible computer files.

Re:Good thinking

[jimstapleton]

oh look, the read only of this tech has come out before the rw...

my point still stands.

Re:Good thinking

[Smidge204]

(Point: a hash is a strong indication, but not a lock...)

Granted. However, what ar the odds that the dataset you produce will make sense in the given context?

For example, if you had 600GB of financial data "protected" by an SHA1 hash. You find another data set that had the same hash. Do you think you would be able to pass off your data set for the original? How likely is it that te program used to read the original will accept your data without complaint and not have obvious discrepencies from reality? Like, say, you tried to cover up a billion dollar funds transfer, but to make the hash work out someone else had to accumulate a debt equal to three times the global economy's annual production...

If you only want to corrupt or destroy the data, that's one thing. If you want to tamper with the data in a way that's not obvious (eg only change a small set of values), any success will likely be the result of pure luck. In that sense, a hash is a fairly decent way to tamper-proof data.
=Smidge=

Re:Good thinking

[Anonymous Coward]

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 .

Re:Good thinking

[RoboJ1M]

But RAID is not a backup solution.

What was it again? 'cat 0 > /'?

J1M.

Re:Good thinking

[anandsr]

Laserdisk was the result of a technology, which resulted in CDs and later DVDs. So it will still be beneficial for the early market, one which really needs the storage capacities of the disk to try it out. Ofcourse they will have to be rich enough to be able to throw that money for trying it out.

Re:Good thinking

[Ed Avis]

3) (600 gigabytes) / (600 megabytes) = 1 024 times better

You clearly haven't been reading Slashdot this morning. In fact it's only a lousy 1000 times better - clearly a rip-off by the optical disk makers to give you less capacity than you thought.

Re:Good thinking

[pegr]

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...

Re:Good thinking

[morgan_greywolf]

First off, CD-Rs are WORMs -- Write-Once, Read Many.

Secondly, if you read what I just posted, CD-Rs, the write-once tech, came out before CD-RWs. It's exactly the same case here.

So unless your point was to agree with poster you were replying to, which to me it didn't seem that way, then no, your point does not still stand.

Re:Good thinking

[Znork]

"But RAID is not a backup solution."

It is if you have two inexpensive devices that you umount and power down. Or five. Or a second computer with the devices. The philosophy inherent in the concept Redundant Array of Inexpensive Devices, as opposed to the various forms of RAID, is to use lots of cheap hardware to replace expensive overengineered really (really, really, we promise!) reliable hardware.

Sure you can wipe one device with a misplaced rm. You can wipe a tape with a misplaced rewind (heck, I've seen tape devices on shared busses get rewound by misbehaving applications in the middle of another machines backups). Or conceivable a holographic storage module with a misplaced laser pointer (or in a variety of other more likely ways).

Redundancy is the key to data safety. And for redundancy, inexpensive and simple is the way to go.

Re:Good thinking

[Anonymous Coward]

Our company stored mass amounts of files on smaller optical disks 700 MB
when our business insurance man found out or entire companies data was on 1 CD
  He raised our premiums by another 4000 pound per month
quoting
ID theft and data loss is a risk You must not store that much data in one place
the point of the above is :
  There are probably good reasons to use huge storage capacity and just as many reasons to not use it.

Huge disks =Bigger data loss potential , what's next for this stuff ?
drives for use on a laptop?

Can anyone foresee a company losing all of their data ?
I can see it ! Bigger may notalwaqys be better

Re:Good thinking

[rbanffy]

There are several ways to decrease the risk of a hash collision. The most obvious one is to publish both the SHA and, say, an MD5 of the same data. This way, anyone who wants a collision, will have to make a collision that happens in both algorithm.

You can also run the hash in your hard disk backwards too, so, unless your HD holds the longest palindrome ever, the same collision will not work.

You could also sha1 both even and odd bytes separately. You could also hash them separately with multiple algorithms. Well.. You get the idea.

I doubt many sha1 collisions will also even be CRC32 collisions.

Re:Good thinking

[4105]

An audit trail is not critical either. Suppose you have "project" of some sort that is finished. You wan to store this 600 GB project in long term storage, but you might need to reference it quickly. Pop it on to one of these disks and hope that you can still get a working drive in 10 years.

Re:Good thinking

[rbanffy]

Make that 20 years and your chances of reading a valid Excel 2007 file in Excel 2027 are every bit as small as a hash collision.

"What is a 'file', granpa?"

Re:Good thinking

[undercanopy]

Nobody is saying that one of these should be an entire backup solution. But if i have a 3TB database that needs to archived, i'd much rather use 5 of these than 4616 CDs, 639 DVDs, or even 15 ultrium tapes.

Data is getting so (too?) big that we NEED things this size just to be able to physically manage it all in any sort of convenient way.

Re:Good thinking

[ars]

I know this seems obvious, but it actually wrong.

SH1 and MD5 are both basically the same algorithm, with some changes, so it's quite possible to find something that matches both.

And: how do you think a MD5 hash works? It takes two unrelated hashes, and combines them, since after all, how likely is it that a change will properly affect both hashes? Well you know the answer to that since MD5 has been semi-broken.

So far no one has come up with an unbreakable hash, it apparently is very hard to do. All the exiting hashes (from MD1 and up, and including SHA*) are all based on the same idea, each new version adding some new twist to make it work better, but the basic premise for all of them is based on the work of one guy.

Re:Good thinking

[Lunar_Lamp]

I think you might have just shifted some people into the Bleeding Edge category of users there...

Re:Good thinking

[Rob Kaper]

I can fiddle with white space, unallocated disk blocks, executables (since they are not likely to be executed from backup nor examined closely), whatever.

If you're truly lucky the source data is in XML, with its extensibility by definition. Almost makes me wonder if data tempering was the true force behind its development and adoption. :-)

Re:Good thinking

[Eccles]

Heck, what about CD writers? In 1994 I worked for a company that often burned CD-Rs. The writer cost $8,000, the discs $16, and bad burns were common.

I have a better CD writer sitting in a box now, because it's not worth my time to put it in any of my machines.

Re:Good thinking

[norminator]

1) Longevity/reliability

I'm not convinced... What if this ends up being the next zip drive... only since it's optical, instead of getting a "Click of Death", we'll get the Flash of Death. It's an awful feeling, sitting at your desk, backing up 600 GB of hard work, when all of a sudden your $18,000 optical drive starts emitting bright flashes of light, and you know that both disk and drive are toast.

I can't wait.

Re:Good thinking

[ricebowl]

Meaning, potentially, something like the entire run of every season of every Star Trek series ever... on one disc.

There's always a down-side to any new technology; there's no need to draw attention to that aspect. Not when we're still stunned by the price.

Ugh...I can feel more Voyager nightmares heading my way...

Re:Good thinking

[pegr]

All hashes are broken by definition. You can't have a value, one in 2^63, represent any arbitrary file of arbitrary length. As large as 2^63 is, there are many more possible files. So it's not that a particular hash has more than one matching dataset. Every hash value has an infinite number of matching datasets. The value of the hash is entirely based on the difficulty in finding matching datasets, a job that gets progressively easier with each passing moment.

Short answer? Like all crypto, hashes buy you time, that's it. Unfortunately, the amount of time they buy you is constantly shrinking and isn't particularly obvious at any point.

As for finding a dataset that matches both an SHA1, an MD5, and whatever else you want to throw in (SHA1 of even bytes, whatever), while the job of finding such a dataset made be made more difficult, there are still an infinite number of correct answers.

It reminds me of discusions of infinity I vaguely remember. Can you have more or less infinity? If the entire real number set is infinity, would only positive reals be considered infinity/2? Of course not... But only positive reals is less than all reals, is it not?

Re:Good thinking

[Smidge204]

So I will give you a database dump and an SHA1 digest for it. Produce a set of data that has the same SHA1 hash value while preserving the database structure and without introducing any "noise" that would readily suggest corruption of some kind.

Good luck.

We are not talking about fouling up somebody's torrent by passing out junk data blocks. We're talking about purpose-made backups of specific data types. If I make a backup of my credit history then I would expect, if I ever needed t restore from said backup, that it would contain credit history data. Things like unallocated disk blocks and EXE files don't even begin to factor into it. If I have even the slightest concern that the data may have been tampered with, I can simply look for any discrepencies that I know shouldn't be there or for any data that is either not read into the database (junk at the end) or inconsistencies that suggest data was removed.

It's far from the trivial task you make it sound like.
=Smidge=

Re:Good thinking

[TrevorB]

Redundancy is not backup. If you had a fire, or a hacker deface and delete your website, no RAID is going to fix that.

The tape/HD size ratio is getting so ridiculous that at work we're seriously considering using Hard Drives as removable tape-like media for backup. Any other solution for backing up terabytes of data is too expensive.

Re:Good thinking

[jimstapleton]

Synopsis:

the original poster complained there was no benefit that there was no benefit other than a new type of media, and it was write-once, which he couldn't see the purpose of.

I replied with my comment asking if he ever bought CD-Rs

The next person replied about CD-Rs and RWs not coming out at the same time, as if it were a counter to my original point.

I stated that I expect to see the same thing with this tech also.

You make your comment missing a huge part of the conversation somehow.

I write this post.

Re:Good thinking

[Izmunuti]

I think that comparing it to hard drives is not as accurate as a comparison with high-end tape drives. Such drives can cost $15,000 or more. The cost, capacity and speed are roughly comparable but the holodrive has random-access and its disks might be more durable than tape cartridges.

Re:Good thinking

[Jessta]

You still need some backups of that Raid array.
DVDs and even Blue-Ray are still way too small.

You can't do backups to hard drives because they aren't very reliable, the whole moving part thing is a problem.
So this tech is going to allow for a good optical backup solution.

Re:Good thinking

[Jugalator]

With 1TB hard drives hitting the market, is it really worth spending $180 for 1 (!) optical disk and a $18k for the drive?

No. But was the very early first generations of CD's and DVD's worth it? No.
This sort of pricing is typical for immature technology if you haven't noticed.

Re:Good thinking

[Thundersnatch]

The tape/HD size ratio is getting so ridiculous that at work we're seriously considering using Hard Drives as removable tape-like media for backup. Any other solution for backing up terabytes of data is too expensive.

We've been doing this for a few years actually, as a "roll your own" solution. We currently use removable drive carriers from DataStor, and 500 GB Seagate disks (first ATA, now SATA). We also use foam-padded locking carriers that are take off-site every day. We do ~1.2 TB of backups every night, and have had exactly one drive failure in 4 years.

We actually back up to a large fixed disk array using various backup software from multiple systems, and then make an encrypted copy all of those files to the removable disks using 7-ZIP. We then pad the empty space on the removable drives with Par2 data if possible (we compute as much data as our window allows, currently about 20% redundancy). We also store unencrypted binaries (and source if possible) of all the software needed for recovery with each backup.

We have not evaluated any of the commerial "disk to disk" backup solutions, as ours has proven simple and reliable, and all we need is an SATA- or USB2-equipped machine to begin recovery. Most of the commercial hardware solutions require you to have a similar (proprietary) unit at the recovery site.

Re:Good thinking

[Jugalator]

When these are priced reasonbly, we'll probably have something like 10 TB drives so 600 GB isn't that much. Like 30 GB on a 500 GB drive of today.

Re:Good thinking

[Control Group]

It reminds me of discusions of infinity I vaguely remember. Can you have more or less infinity? If the entire real number set is infinity, would only positive reals be considered infinity/2? Of course not... But only positive reals is less than all reals, is it not?

Yes, you can. But not that way. There are as many positive rational numbers as there are all rational numbers; the cardinality of the sets is equivalent: they are both countable. The integers, natural numbers, rational numbers, prime numbers are all countable sets. Their infinities are the same "size".

The reals, however, are an uncountable set, and their infinity is "bigger" than the integers.

It is also the case that there are an infinite number of larger infinities. (The proof for this is particularly neat).

Re:Good thinking

[Control Group]

AHEM

That last line was supposed to be:

The proof for this is particularly neat.

Re:Good thinking

[pegr]

Let's rehash... (heehee!)

How many spaces are in this post? How about tabs? Yes, the stricter the data spec, the harder it is to alter without discovery. The orginal context was "disk"; the the data items I mentioned were certainly open to tampering. Now you want to redefine the data, that's fine. My observations still hold.

The main point was you could make it difficult but you couldn't make it impossible. The second point was that there was no way to define how difficult you could make it, only "more" or "less". (So how do you determine "enough"?)

It doesn't take much to alter data without being obvious. Heck, just correct the human errors already there! Would that be obvious to you? "ACK! My data looks too clean! It's obviously been tampered with!" ;)

Re:Good thinking

[Ant P.]

For price-to-capacity ratio, it sounds far better value than any Blu-Ray drive on the market.

Re:Good thinking

[Ant P.]

At this price, I'd rather spend the extra for 6 discs and RAID5 the backup. Better than the risk of having five very expensive coasters.

Re:Good thinking

[toQDuj]

Wasn't the trick behind holographics that a part of the pattern could be used to reconstruct the entire pattern? That would make restoring the data on a dropped (and shattered) holographic cube much more convenient..

Re:Good thinking

[rbanffy]

As pegr pointed out, there cannot be an unbreakable hash and hashes may only buy you time.

However as someone else pointed out, if you divulge further information on your file, while it won't make it impossible to have a different file with the same hash, it will make far less likely that someone can bring out a file with the same hash that also has that same length, is a valid bzip2 stream and, after decompression, has the same internal structure (is a valid OOo document). There is a finite number of files with a given length and thus, a finite number of hash collisions at that same file length. If none of the collisions is also a valid bzip2 stream that encodes a valid OOo file, you have, effectively, a pretty much as-good-as-it-gets almost-unforgeable dataset.

Of course, the vestigial mathematician inside me says that, in order to create that unforgeable hash plus the set of rules the file must conform to in order to be considered authentic, you will have to disclose a volume of information equal or larger than the file itself.

Re:Good thinking

[undercanopy]

At this price, I'd rather spend the extra for 6 discs and RAID5 the backup. Better than the risk of having five very expensive coasters.

For mortals, sure, but the new stuff is always ungodly expensive when it first comes out. Especially when they're marketing it to places that have the money to pay for the convenience

Re:Good thinking

[ars]

No, unfortunately this is incorrect. bzip2 probably will ignore data after the end of the stream, plus it has future usage blocks that are likely ignored. OOo also has areas that are ignored by the editor. (I'm generalizing, I didn't check either program, but many - can I say most? - programs have such areas.)

Using those areas you can add whatever padding data you need to "fix" the hash after adding your fake data.

Recording the file length makes it harder, true. But if you are the one generating the hash you can pre-padd the data to give you a space later for this manipulation.

Have a look: http://www.cits.rub.de/MD5Collisions/ the page has links to two postscript files with identical MD5's. Quite different content though.

Re:Good thinking

[mabhatter654]

Boy does your insurance guy not know his stuff!!!

Routine backups with current LTO3 tapes can put up to 800MB on a tape in about 2 hours. Most mid size companies need one tape for a full system and the tapes are about $120 each. a full month of backup rotation (daily/weekly/monthly) is about $3500. To data optical disks just don't compete with tape. A DVD is what 9 gig.. that's pocket change in the data backup world. There are places like Walmart or Visa that would fill a backup tape in an HOUR of critical transaction data!!! These are guys buying 100 tape (that's ~600 GB each) libraries and wanting more. As far as cost this is comparable to a server version of a LTO3 library from the big guys, it's right in line and finally almost capable of making optical media usable for enterprise.

Re:Good thinking

[Smidge204]

Cute :)

Your context was hard disks, my context was from by dkf's post (19176909) about financial audit trails. Sorry for the mixup there.

I would determine "Good enough" to be the point where the time and effort required to pull it off is unreasonable compared to other methods to acheive the same (or similar) result.

Although I still think you're underestimating the practical implications. Yes, in theory it is "easy" to alter data in a way that is hard to detect but still hashes the same as unaltered data - but in practice... To find two data sets with the same hash and yet are similar enough to be interchanged without rousing suspicion? I still say it's impossible.

Considering SHA-1 is 160 bit, then there should be 2^160 unique outputs each with at least one unique input. The input range is 0 to 2^64-1 bits, or 2^(2^64-1) unique sets (Check that math?). In that range, find two sets that produce the same output (which has been proven possible) *and* are at least, say, 80% identical. That sounds like a reasonable fudge factor to me before one could become suspicious that the data was tampered with.

I'm no mathematician or cryptologist, so you may actually find one (or many!) - but then consider the odds that the matching sets represent both the original data AND the desired altered data. The likelyhood of finding it would probably increase with set size, but by the time we're dealing with sets that are billions of terabytes large we'd probably have moved on to something else.
=Smidge=

Re:Good thinking

[pegr]

Do SHA1 hashes have a even distribution? If so, a file with length (2^63)/256 could be altered, one bit at a time, to generate any hash you want. If you consider all files up to that length, you could get there much sooner.

(Yes, I understand such a file is ridiculously large... 32,768 TB... Imagine a Beowulf cluster of.... :)

Re:Good thinking

[Hootnholler]

You aren't thinking large scale enough. This is not a drive to put into your home computer.

Toss an autoloading platter jukebox onto the front of this and you can start long term archival recording of business documents (mortgage documents > 30 years).

Hook this up to a SAN and use it for an automated migration of dormant data off of the magnetic disks. You could potentially replace tape backup drives with these (and yes, corporations still by lots of tapes and tape drives)

Throw the entire content of a movie onto this, raw footage, edited footage, etc. so that a director or studio could have the entire intellectual property on a single disk.

Regulatory compliance infomation needs long term, stable media for regulated data storage.

There are lots of things you could use this for that doesn't require the moving parts and potential magnetic scrambling risks that are associated with hard drives. It is not a general purpose item in its current state but in some situations, the cost/stability/etc. has potential.

Re:Good thinking

[rbanffy]

OK. You got the point. I could say "a valid, unpadded, bzip2 stream" and this argument would disappear.

I could also encode my voice with the document as a direct sample sequence, but then one could tweak the least significant bits of every sample in order to get a hash collision, but the kind of effort required to do that without touching any other hash we could generate out of the file (and we could generate a dozen of them) and still have something that could pass for my voice borders the impossible so close it would risk being deported back to the realm of the possible.

But we are basically saying the same thing - it is possible, but it is impossibly-hard to do it.

If hashes are evenly distributed and we are considering a 20 million byte file, you would get a collision every 2 ^ (20 million - 128) times you tweak the file in a unique way. My brain refuses to dedicate itself to make sure of this number, but 2 ^ 20e6 is a lot of work.

And using a program (postcript is a programming language) is cheating. Given different inputs (i.e. date, who is looking) the same program can display anything. One should always know what is being shown. Although the document is the same, the output when it runs on a PS interpreter is vastly different. One should never think of a program as a static document. And, IIRC, this programmability extends to PDF.

Re:Good thinking

[zippthorne]

Would that be a RAID array.. of Disks? Or are you talking about the less common, but more fun, matrix of redundant pesticide canisters?

Seriously though (for sufficiently small values of serious) we need to work on the RAID acronym. It's not nearly redundant enough, but the problem is that Redundant RAID Array of In(expensive|dependent) Disks collapses to RRAIDAID, and making that redundant enough expands the acronym recursively and exponentially. What we need is a properly recursive/redundant acronym that expands to no larger than a single fully-redundant iteration.

Re:Good thinking

[LWATCDR]

RAID isn't a replacement for archival storage. It is pretty hard to send a RAID array to an off-site storage facility. You can do it with an external hard-drive but the that is far from an ideal solution.
Also write once is a benefit in some situations. Write once devices tend to have a longer storage life and for things like and are even a requirement for some applications. Think about financial transactions and document storage. Even things like satellite data.

Re:Good thinking

[fuzz6y]

Of course, the vestigial mathematician inside me says that, in order to create that unforgeable hash plus the set of rules the file must conform to in order to be considered authentic, you will have to disclose a volume of information equal or larger than the file itself. No, it is impossible to uniquely describe every file of a given length N in such a way that the description for each file is shorter than N, by the pigeon hole principle. That says nothing about any particular file of length N.
My file is 2^256 bytes, all of which are zero.
There. that signature only fits a single file, but is certainly shorter than that file.

Re:Good thinking

[fuzz6y]

You give me a SHA1 hash and five years. If the money's right, I'll give you back a dataset that matches that hash within that five years.

That is an entirely idle boast. SHA1 is "broken." Broken doesn't mean anything like what you think it does. There are several ways in which a hash algorithm can be broken.

1. It is possible to find any 2 files with the same hash in less time than should be required by randomly trying files.
2. It is possible to find any 2 files with the same hash in a computationally feasible amount of time.
3. It is possible, given a file, to find another file with the same hash in less time than should be required by randomly trying files.
4. It is possible, given a file, to find another file with the same hash in a computationally feasible amount of time.
5. It is possible, given a file, to find another file with the same hash that doesn't look like a pile of random crap in less time than should be required by randomly trying files.
6. It is possible, given a file, to find another file with the same hash that doesn't look like a pile of random crap in a computationally feasible amount of time.

One break tends to lead to another eventually, and as Bruce Schneier is fond of saying, attacks always get better, they never get worse. So even the smallest break is enough reason to start looking for a new hash algorithm to use in the future. But make no mistake, what we've got for SHA1 is 1. If you've got enough computing horsepower, maybe 2. Certainly not 3, and 6, which you would need to make good on your promise, is right out. What you claim to be able to do in 5 years, I doubt the NSA could do in 20.

Re:Good thinking

[wirelessbuzzers]

So what happens to your strategy when a weakness is announced? Do you tell your auditors that it was good enough five years ago? Yes, actually. At least today, hash breaks generally allow you to create two documents with the same hash (a collision), not to create a second document with the same hash as a given first one (a second preimage). Of course, there could be such a weakness, but if the hash is long enough (SHA256? SHA512?), it's unlikely. And you could always use two hashes, which would both have to be broken...

Let's put it another way... You give me a SHA1 hash and five years. If the money's right, I'll give you back a dataset that matches that hash within that five years... People always say this about crypto, but the vast majority of the time, it doesn't actually happen. Cryptanalytic attacks that can break real systems with a realistic amount of compute power are fairly rare; attacks that break offline systems are extremely rare. And remember, you can't brute-force a second preimage for a 128-bit hash (much less a 160- or 256-bit one) with any currently-forseeable technology.

No amount of money can enable a brute force attack here. If the survival of the human race depended on a 128-bit brute force attack, I doubt that we could do it in five years. (Standard calculation: if you could produce 4 billion chips per second, each of which could try 4 billion keys per second, it would take more than a century to go through half of a 128-bit key space.)

Re:Good thinking

[drgonzo59]

Yes, if you had knowledge of the future and knew that the technology was going to stay unlike say Laserdisc and others that came and went before they became widespread...

Re:Good thinking

[drgonzo59]

Toss an autoloading platter jukebox onto the front of this and you can start long term archival recording of business documents (mortgage documents > 30 years).

You obviously responded without reading my whole comment (tsk...tsk!).

Alright, so say you buy the $18,000 drive and 200 discs as $180 a piece. You spend a couple of months saving all your highly valuable data, put it in a vault and wait a 30 years. BUT, the next year, the company that created the $18,000 and their proprietary storage goes belly up because there aren't enough fools to spend so much on a new technology without having any guarantee that it will last when the purpose of the backups it to last . By last I mean there being way to get the data back. In 5 years the $18k drive gets full of dust and dies and 20 years down the road you want to access your document -- what do you do?

Re:Good thinking

[drgonzo59]

Aren't you glad though you didn't spend tens of thousands paying someone to back-up your old family movies on it, or some valuable data. If you had to read that data now, it won't be as easy as going to the store and buying a player.

And with this you spend $18k for a new drive, an expensive media and they are both proprietary. If the company goes belly up next year, your cat pisses on your $18k drive how do you get your data back? It is not smart to adopt a new and bleeding edge technology to such areas as long term data backup!

Re:Good thinking

[drgonzo59]

Bleeding edge is always a ridiculous expense

Yes. But that wasn't the main point. You missed the other point, the one about obsolescence where the company that made the proprietary drive and format going belly-up next year. And then those who backed up their data on these disks not being able to get it back.

Re:Good thinking

[blueskies]

Good post. Except that LTO3 can store 400GB and LTO4 can store 800GB.

Re:Good thinking

[paganizer]

I bought a pinnacle external SCSI single speed burner in '94. media was about $10 a pop. The drive cost me $1900. I made up the cost of the drive doing backups in about 3 months. I still have, and use, some of the CD's i made; the media was about 2 times as thick as the modern day stuff, and I've never had ANY problems reading them. The point is: if they make a relatively cheap reader for these puppies (like $200, +/- 40), I'll buy one. I might wait until it comes down to 10k, but I'll buy one. It's a good inverstment. If they don't build a reader cheap... welll, screw it.

Re:Good thinking

[cheesybagel]

Yes it will get cheaper with higher data densities. So will hard discs. Hard discs are rewritable too.

Re:Good thinking

[RespekMyAthorati]

The main point was you could make it difficult but you couldn't make it impossible.

It doesn't need to be impossible. It just needs to take longer than the expected lifetime of the universe.

Re:Good thinking

[Eivind]

Anything can be faked. Security ain't an absolute, but just a question of reasonable assurances.

Read-only media can be faked too -- how do you plan on proving that this is the holomem recorded in 1997, and not a replacement-one made and recorded in 2002 ? That being said, you understate the difficulty of breaking a modern hash, 2^128 is a humongous number, large enough that brute-forcing a collision is out of the question, especially since the starting-point being known stops you from using the birthday-attack (which lowers your workload to aproximately sqrt(2^128) if you only need to find 2 equal hashes, not a second message that hashes to a given value.

Finding a second file that gives the same sha1-hash is very very likely to be much more difficult than faking other records such as the typical standard of today: plain old paper.

Re:Good thinking

[pegr]

It doesn't need to be impossible. It just needs to take longer than the expected lifetime of the universe.
 
  And how long is that exactly?
 
Yes, it would take the expected lifetime of the universe, if technology and research stood still from this point forward!

Re:Good thinking

[pegr]

Thread is dead and buried, but yet...

OK, don't take my word for it, take Bruce's...

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/02/cryp tanalysis_o.html
 
 

"SHA-1 produces a 160-bit hash. That is, every message hashes down to a 160-bit number. Given that there are an infinite number of messages that hash to each possible value, there are an infinite number of possible collisions. But because the number of possible hashes is so large, the odds of finding one by chance is negligibly small (one in 280, to be exact). If you hashed 280 random messages, you'd find one pair that hashed to the same value. That's the "brute force" way of finding collisions, and it depends solely on the length of the hash value. "Breaking" the hash function means being able to find collisions faster than that. And that's what the Chinese did.

They can find collisions in SHA-1 in 269 calculations, about 2,000 times faster than brute force. Right now, that is just on the far edge of feasibility with current technology. Two comparable massive computations illustrate that point.

In 1999, a group of cryptographers built a DES cracker. It was able to perform 256 DES operations in 56 hours. The machine cost $250K to build, although duplicates could be made in the $50K-$75K range. Extrapolating that machine using Moore's Law, a similar machine built today could perform 260 calculations in 56 hours, and 269 calculations in three and a quarter years. Or, a machine that cost $25M-$38M could do 269 calculations in the same 56 hours.' 3.25 years (is less than) 5 years... (If the money's right.)

Yes, I know I'm missing a lot of detail. No, I don't want to beat this silly argument anymore. I'm just saying that using SHA1 to maintain data integrety for five years is a misuse of SHA1. I'm done. ;)

libraries?

[Anonymous Cowpat]

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.

Re:libraries?

[owlstead]

Dunno, a library of congress could store millions of these disks!

Re:libraries?

[KokorHekkus]

A library isn't always a public lending library. Another type of libarary that could actually might have use for this type of storage solutions (not necessarily exactly this one) is what I would call historical research libraries. Their function is to protect the material and at the same time make it more accessible to people. It's not unusual for these libraries to have a serious digitizing projects so that the originals don't have to be disturbed (especially if they are physically deteriorated). Just the other week I heard a radio program about one of those digitizing projects.. they create digital material on a terabyte scale every week. They also used some pretty hefty scanners there... their newest machinge could scan one loose page into a high resolution image per second. I suspect that machine cost £9000 or perhaps more.

Re:libraries?

[PDAllen]

The type of library that is a copyright library (i.e. receives a copy of every published book) rather than a public library (which is what you are thinking of). Think about e.g. university libraries, the British Library, the Library of Congress, that sort of thing. Obviously a public lending library isn't going to want one of these things, but then you don't go to a public library when you want to find a bit of obscure data.

Re:libraries?

[infinite9]

What kind of library has £9000 to spend on a single piece of computer hardware?

The Library of Congress? They need to figure out how many times they can copy themselves to one disk.

And for that matter, the VW Club of America will need one to see how many VW Beetles they can cram into the drive.

I'll pass

[cowscows]

If the storage medium is anything other than a small, transparent, and slightly iridescent cube; then I'm not interested. Discs are so 90's.

Re:I'll pass

[Benosaurus]

Good point. Hell, we're switching to hot site from tape/disc. The price of active backup is actually LESS than the cost of your typical DR setup (depending on your company's size.)

Re:I'll pass

[suv4x4]

If the storage medium is anything other than a small, transparent, and slightly iridescent cube; then I'm not interested. Discs are so 90's.

How about a little wooden ball with your name on it?

It is all about data transfer speed...

[ZombieEngineer]

From the article: Holographic storage offers extremely fast data transfer rates - currently up to 160Mbit/sec, though there are plans to increase this. When you have a multi-Terabyte system to backup AND verify within a short window (say 4 hours), speed trumps price just about every time. What is the cost of NOT having a backup? ZombieEngineer

Re:It is all about data transfer speed...

[CrimsonScythe]

But 160Mbit/s is only 20MB/s, at which speed it will take about 8.5 hours to fill the drive. Surely using a new hard drive or RAID at >70MB/s, or a decent tape system, must be much better for backing up on? Though, I guess at $18k one could afford to use a hard drive RAID system to do snapshot on before writing to the holographic storage.

Re:It is all about data transfer speed...

[fireboy1919]

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.

Re:It is all about data transfer speed...

[owlstead]

160 Mbit/sec? That's about 33% of the speed of current hard drives, maximum. Remember, transfer speeds are normally measured in MB/sec (or, more accurately, MiB/sec) not Mbit/sec. And for hard drives there are RAID solutions readily available. The things that might be interesting for customers are reliability, power consumption and (kind of) storage space needed. It might be that these things beat hard drives in these sections. Storage capacity, speed and price of hard drives are definately not yet within reach, it seems.

Re:It is all about data transfer speed...

[springbox]

Yes, but having a bunch of cheap hard drives really isn't as portable and would probably use much more energy overall.

Re:It is all about data transfer speed...

[DragonWriter]

160 Mbit/sec? That's about 33% of the speed of current hard drives, maximum.

And 600GB on a CD-sized disk is a lot higher data denisty than current hard drives, and its probably more resistant to shock, etc. With a write-once disk, you aren't looking to replace hard drives in regular day-to-day use, its a archival, backup, and perhaps high-volume distribution medium (where you fill several of them with data, jump in a car, and drive to where you want your data to end up). Now, admittedly, I don't have the kind of storage needs where the physial size of a many-terabyte backup is something I worry about, but I'm sure there are large scientific, corporate, and government applications where that might be very interesting.

Re:It is all about data transfer speed...

[nbritton]

From the article: Holographic storage offers extremely fast data transfer rates - currently up to 160Mbit/sec

You do realize that 160 megabits = 20 megabytes? If your looking for speed back it up to a secondary disk array, easily 80MByte/s.

the drive costs about $18,000

[myspace-cn]

"the drive costs about $18,000" to take a saying from David Letterman, "WHAT?!" "WHAT!?"

Re:the drive costs about $18,000

[Angelwrath]

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.

Re:the drive costs about $18,000

[dparnass]

You are hit the nail on the head. Also not only will corporations buy the item but also extremelt wealthy individuals. It is the Wealth individuals and corporations, and at times Governments who use new espensive technology when it first comes out and then as the technology cathces on and gets cheaper and smaller and/or corporations will begin to use it making it cheaper. for example cell phones used to be so expensive only Millionaires could use them and only in major cities. Also they were so large you carried them in a bag. Now they are so small you wwear them on your hip and the contracts make them competative with a land line phone.

Re:the drive costs about $18,000

[treeves]

Can be. Now be a jolly good chap and remind me to ring my friend called Ifor who's landed 'imself in hospital, what what.

But why?

[samael]

When 1TB hard drives are now making an appearance, why would you spend $18000 on a drive that stores data on expensive 600GB disks?

Re:But why?

[yakumo.unr]

Because magnetic media fails, badly, often, and at any time.
It is in NO way a long term backup solution.

Re:But why?

[ricebowl]

Possibly due to the security offered by a non-re-writable medium? I guess if you're certain that the back-ups aren't going to be over-written by the misplaced click of the mouse at some point that might be worth the premium.

Please note that I said 'might'. I can't say I'm entirely confident in that as a benefit worth the price; however if the medium follows the same increases in size as hard drives have then I'm happy to watch. Especially as, I think, the data-recovery from the disk exceeds most other forms of archival media. With the exception, I think, of the HDD.

Frankly I'm just glad to have holographic storage as an option, though I'd still prefer the Superman-style crystals simply for the sheer class and style. Though, apparently, they were never labelled. Which might make back-ups and recovery a problem...

Re:But why?

[Benosaurus]

Because magnetic media fails, badly, often, and at any time.
It is in NO way a long term backup solution.

And you don't expect the first generation of this system to fail?! Heh.

Magnetic doesn't fail as much as you make it sound. We have 100s of TB backed up on 400 GB Tivoli tapes and rarely lose a tape. If we do, its not the media itself... a pin from a tape will get stuck in the drive (from the tape being mishandled -- someone dropped it a few times.) The media itself is still usable.

BTW... our tapes run about $50 each. You can find a 20 TB tape library for under $9K. And yes, it is a long term solution. We've had our Tivoli/ADSM products for 15 years.... and they still work (and so do the tapes.)

Re:But why?

[Znork]

Magnetic media fails if it's constantly used. Turn a TB disk off and store it on the shelf, and I doubt it will fail any faster than your average optical storage.

Either way, if you want to be sure about your archived data, forget 'backup' and 'archive' paradigms and keep multiple copies online on live storage where you'll actually note, and can recover from, backing media failures. Live storage is as cheap as media based backups and archives for most dataset sizes and purposes these days, and will only get more so as the driving storage consumers tilts even more into the realm of home use.

Re:But why?

[yakumo.unr]

There was a recent google report that suggested otherwise, though this obviously isn't the same as just sticking them on a shelf.

http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/ 18/0420247

(from the PDF)
"Overall, we expected to notice a very strong and con-
sistent correlation between high utilization and higher
failure rates. However our results appear to paint a more
complex picture. First, only very young and very old
age groups appear to show the expected behavior. Af-
ter the first year, the AFR of high utilization drives is
at most moderately higher than that of low utilization
drives. The three-year group in fact appears to have the
opposite of the expected behavior, with low utilization
drives having slightly higher failure rates than high uti-
lization ones."

Next time I'll hit the preview button.

[ZombieEngineer]

From the article:

Holographic storage offers extremely fast data transfer rates - currently up to 160Mbit/sec, though there are plans to increase this. When you have a multi-Terabyte system to backup AND verify within a short window (say 4 hours), speed trumps price just about every time.

What is the cost of NOT having a backup?

ZombieEngineer

Re:Next time I'll hit the preview button.

[AltGrendel]

Personally, I like the first one better.

Re:Next time I'll hit the preview button.

[Znork]

"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.

Re:Next time I'll hit the preview button.

[simm1701]

Yes but you do not build mission critical hardware out of off the shelf components.

You buy high availability systems, usually with redundancy and a rated uptime in the region of 4, 5 or even 6 9's

Take a fairly low end box in this space, a Clariion CX300 - got a small one for testing a couple of years ago for 25k (GBP) with 300Gb of storage (scsi 15k rpm) and thats before putting raid onto them.

Oh and if you want the remote copy software license not only do you need another box at the same price but you'll probably pay more than the hardware price for the software (then add SAN, fibre link to offsite office etc etc)

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.

Re:Next time I'll hit the preview button.

[Znork]

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.

There is a need...

[msauve]

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.

Re:There is a need...

[mal0rd]

Thanks for finding the information I was just going to lookup on their website. 50 years may not be optimal, but it's a lot better then the only competitors, hard drives or burned DVDs, which usually fail under 10 years. The fact that it's write-once is another plus, since even software bugs can't damage the data.

Your other point is valid, but secondary. If your DVDs or HDDs have degraded beyond readability, they're useless no matter how many readers you have. And if the life-span of the reader is longer then the life-span of a DVD or HDD, then you don't even need to worry about availability, since you store a few readers along with the disc. With a standard interface like USB mass storage or SATA it'll surely still be usable for decades.

Re:There is a need...

[suv4x4]

Evidence 1:
The manufacturer rates it at 50 year archival life, with no specifics about how that number was derived

Evidence 2:
Despite being available in research for over 40 years, it is only commercialised now

It's obvious: they just wrote few discs and waited to see what happens.

Re:There is a need...

[suv4x4]

It's a proprietary solution, from a single startup company - what are the odds that a reader is going to exist in 50 years?

Just to clarify, CD/DVD/HD-DVD/BluRay - they are all proprietary solutions in the full meaning of the word.

Your second point has more merit, since this would look better if theys truck few partnership deals to create those drives/media, versus produce everything themselves.

But since it's pretty much a tight niche market yet, I suppose the big players were not interested (yet).

I'd just wait for Blu-Ray or HD-DVD to be cheaper

[zukinux]

30 GB in average for 1 disc of hd-dvd or blu-ray, so why would I want a 18,000$ drive ?
I guess a package of 50 Discs will cost 50 $ at the beginning and 30*50 = 1500 GB, so I guess I will be waiting for HD-DVD / Blu-Ray rw drives to become cheaper and I will use that kind of solution for my storage of which I'm not having, and getting well with my /home 80GB Partition as it is today.

Uses?

[CriminalNerd]

Personally, I think the only uses for a 600GB write-only-once drive are backups, a DYI Nuclear Weapons for Rising Countries Kit (or similar content), taking "snapshots" of the Internet, and storing the known digits of pi, largest prime numbers, and other interesting numbers.

Then again, there's also the thought about using them for file-servers, and server logs, but seriously, one-writes are not really that attractive given the price tags. Hopefully, the re-writable media/technology will be available within the next few years. (at a cheap price too).

Re:Uses?

[sd_diamond]

Personally, I think the only uses for a 600GB write-only-once drive are backups, a DYI Nuclear Weapons for Rising Countries Kit (or similar content), taking "snapshots" of the Internet, and storing the known digits of pi, largest prime numbers, and other interesting numbers.

But what do you do when Pi changes? Then you're hosed.

A real product?

[Random BedHead Ed]

Wow, a real product. Every time I read about holographic storage, particularly on Slashdot, it's in the same sort of context in which you'd read about quantum computing or Star Trek-style teleportation. Like this: "Scientists at (fill in name of university) have managed to get (name of particle) to (some verb), a first step toward what could one day be practical (quantum computing, space elevators, carbon nanotube frisbees, or whatever). They used a (system you'd never be able to afford) to (do something even your grandkids won't be able to do), and predict that the process will be commercially viable in (about the same amount of time it will take us all to get cold fusion reactors installed in our cars)." Nice to see something like this actually come to market!

Re:A real product?

[squizzar]

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.

Re:A real product?

[osgeek]

What on earth are you talking about? Of course it's not a real product. It's vapor. Here's an article on Slashdot that's not about vapor. See the difference? One is a product that an actual reviewer was able to buy and get his hands on... the other one is just fanciful speculation.

I skimmed through the article looking for a reference to a real product that someone had gotten his hands on... nothing. Just more speculation on how so much gee-whizz-plenty storage will be used to make all our lives so wonderful.

Holographic storage products are always due out "this fall" or "next year". Odds are this is just another stock price or other type of investment pump like it's been for the past 15 years that I've been seeing these announcements.

Tell me about it when I can order one online or see it on the shelf at Fry's. Until that time, don't give these greedy bastards a cent of credit or success in getting all our hopes up with vapor. Like spammers, they do it because they financially benefit from it. Like suckers who fall for spammers, the Slashdot crowd and editors are complicit in that financial success.

Re:A real product?

[Robotbeat]

"A far more useful analysis would be whether this technology could be made cheap when mass produced."

Well, I did holographic research at my University, and the holographic plates we used were about $5-$10, if I remember correctly. That's a lot less than the $180 dollars, and those $180 disks are made of plastic, not glass like the plates were. Granted, the plates I used were for red light (same price for green light ones, though), not for blue light, but I doubt that if you can produce a million of these disks that it would stay at $180 per disk. My guess is that they'd be about $30-$50 in four years, the same price as magneto-optical disks. The company that I work for used to sell a lot of magneto-optical stuff, and the media looks much the same as these holographic disks (I am referring to the disk sleeve etc.), but I bet that the disk itself is cheaper to make ultimately than magneto-optical disks, at least it appears that way to me (fewer layers of different materials than magneto-optical disks, etc.).

Re:A real product?

[osgeek]

We need go no further than Slashdot's search engine to nail these bozos: Same guys last year making claims that they were shipping that year. Here they are the year before along with some other crooks making claims. And earlier in 2005... why do they get so much play for vapor?

Ooh, here's a good one on some guy trying sucker people with funding for his spintronics drive that will bring miraculous storage to the masses. He already has pricing worked out!

While I'm sure that sooner or later one of these technologies will pan out and we'll see a product; it all looks like con men looking for sucker investor money so far. Don't give them any attention until they ship a product or at least a prototype to a magazine that can review their product to prove that it actually exists and seems to work.

Re:A real product?

[kabocox]

Wow, a real product. Every time I read about holographic storage, particularly on Slashdot, it's in the same sort of context in which you'd read about quantum computing or Star Trek-style teleportation

I'm not even sure to treat this as legit till it's been in use for 6 months to a year. Holographic storage has seemed more of a funding black hole than fusion or Duke Nukem Forever. I'd love to see real fusion or holographic storage being sold and used, but I'm not holding my breath.

Re:A real product?

[Jesus_666]

Actually, HVD should come out soon, as well. The HVD Alliance has some pretty big names behind it (Alps, Fuji, Minolta Konica, LiteOn, EMTEC) and they have announced to launch HVCs (credit-card sized holo-storage) in Japan somewhere in the first half of 2007. I expect them to release somewhere in 2008, but it's definitely not going to be long until consumer-level holo-storage will become common.

It remains to be seen whether the announced price (~$1/30GB disk) will hold true; if it does HVC is going to be quite interesting.

Help me...

[Yonder Way]

...Obi-Wan Kenobi; you're my only hope!

LOL

[BACbKA]

thanks for that one

Ultra high definition media

[Koookiemonster]

One potential use I can think of is selling/renting really high definition movies, TV series or collections of movies. For example, 10 seasons of "Friends" in ultra high definition would surely take up a lot of space. For that use a single disc with a huge capacity is perfect.

The disc in question is much more elegant and cool than a stack of bulky, noisy hard disks. Elegant and cool may sound petty, but they sell for certain kinds of people with too much money. They even sell RCA cables for more than $18,000.

Re:Ultra high definition media

[Atzanteol]

I already have a location to store all the high-def "friends" episodes I could ever want. /dev/null...

Forget the capacity...

[macraig]

... holographic storage will be soooo much better for saving pr0n.

Re:I'd just wait for Blu-Ray or HD-DVD to be cheap

[zpeterz63]

You'd use the disks for the same reason you would use blu-ray instead of DVD or DVD instead of CD. When you're archiving a lot of data it is much nicer to only have to use one disk verses ten. Keep in mind, with these prices these are not being aimed at individuals. Like the post says it is being aimed more at businesses and such.

I'm so very, very sorry

[Headcase88]

Saying "what" twice is a saying?

YYY-EAHHH!

I want one!!

[RoboJ1M]

The first holographic products are certainly not mass-market

I have a TiB of HDD space at home and my current backups require 20 DVD5s

I do hope it's mass market soon.

J1M.

Re:I want one!!

[swilver]

I assume you mean 200 DVD's -- the exact reason why I just use hard drives for backup :)

Re:I want one!!

[Overzeetop]

It would be cheaper to RAID5 three 500GB drives on a $/GB basis and buy two others as backup media. At $110/HD that's $330 extra to cover your pr0n collection, vs. $360 for a pair of 600GB holographic discs (Fry's has a 500GB UDMA available for $110 shipped today, btw), and you wouldn't need to go spend $18k on the holographic drive. Don't worry, I'll split the $9k in savings with you - you can just send me a cashier's check.

Good looking technology.

[mlts]

I hope InPhase can net some capital on their end so they can work on lowering the price.

I can see installing an autochanger using Inphase Tapestry based technology as a dedicated solution in large corporations to permanently archive large amounts of data. This would be installed side-by-side with existing technologies such as DLT 600 tape which would be used for rewritability.

I'm just glad to see something on the market after the decades of idle promises on holographic storage.

What makes you think...

[msauve]

that their "50 year" life is any more accurate than the "100 year" life given for recordable DVDs? You just claimed that DVD lifetime is overstated by 10x.

Write once does not imply that the content cannot be damaged, or even that the media can't be written to further, only that it cannot be written with useful information (e.g. it may be possible to change bits from 0 to 1, but not the reverse).

Why do you think storing a few $18K readers would have better results in a obtaining a working device 50 years later than simply storing a number of hard drives? MTBF is based on power-on hours, and hardware is hardware. You offer nothing to back up your implication that (unpowered, properly stored) HDD's have short lifetimes.

Their site

[suv4x4]

Is amusing. It's got the pointless wave abstract graphics I usually see on sites with nothing to say (now, of course, I'm not claiming this, these guys seem serious in general).

Their slogan is "data at the speed of light". Because, they use lasers and holographic technology, do you get it? It's a very smart slogan.

But the reason I'm writing this post is this site reminded me of the International Association of Virtual Reality Technologies (IAVRT) which was supposed to bring Neuronet upon us, and they wamnted to fund this by selling "neuronet domains". They have shut down for a "few weeks" until they hit some major partnerships. Quite some months have passed since.

Check their domain page still with the same message (and notice the uncanny similarities in design with InPhase Technologies):

Wavy green lines header

Bottom line is, wavy green lines aren't very convincing, we need high res demos of icy cubes storing TB of data, come on!

We need a new HTML/XML tag for currency values

[Yvan256]

[...] a 600GB disc will cost around $180 (£90) [...]

How about some kind of tag with the amount, the currency and the date? That way, the browser could show us the value in our own currency, checked against the exchange rate for that day?

Re:We need a new HTML/XML tag for currency values

[ButcherCH]

There is a firefox extension that does this: http://viewmycurrency.wordpress.com/

Re:We need a new HTML/XML tag for currency values

[Yusaku Godai]

Because that would violate separation of content and presentation, and would require an ever-present internet connection to have any meaning whatsoever?

It's not a bad idea as maybe a feature in a web browser, but it doesn't make any sense an HTML tag.

Re:We need a new HTML/XML tag for currency values

[Yvan256]

The tag would already contain the amount value and the currency. Without an internet connection it would display as usual but could at least display the currency of the amount. The "$" sign is used by the USA, Canada and Australia (and maybe others, I don't know). Of course you can assume it's in US dollars, but assuming does a lot of damage in a lot of types of informations: currency, lengths/weights, dates, etc.

As for violating the separation of content and presentation, I beg to differ. If the content is meaningless because it assumes a knowledge of locale, then it's not pure "content". Presentation would be more akin to where the $ sign is located. I, for one, never understood why you put $ in front of the amount in english, since you don't say "dollars 50" but "50 dollars".

In any case, even if we did add such a tag, we could be sure Microsoft would screw it up somehow, making it useless since most people are still stuck in Windows+Internet Explorer with no clue as to the alternatives (even if it were Windows + Firefox).

Re:We need a new HTML/XML tag for currency values

[Mr0bvious]

Because that would violate separation of content and presentation, and would require an ever-present internet connection to have any meaning whatsoever? I'm not a web developer and have limited knowledge of the mechanics of html/css etc. But I'm sure that this could be done in the presentation layer? Excuse my limited css/html ignore syntax, it's the concepts I'm trying to show:

html:

<div class="currency" base_currency="US" value="650.02">650.02</div>

css:

currency
{
auto_convert_currency : true;
prepend_currency_tag : true;
}

replaces all values = to "$650.02" with e.g. "$US650.02" or "$AUS788.32"

Does this satisfy the presentation/content rules? I don't know. Possibly also violates the way css works, again, I don't know. But I can't see that such functionality couldn't be implemented in some manner to meet the separation of content and presentation rules.

And of course you would just default to no conversion when a connection is not present.

It's not a bad idea as maybe a feature in a web browser, but it doesn't make any sense an HTML tag. I disagree, I think the information like base currency and value need to be presented in a formal manner. If the web browser must make any assumptions or guesses then I will not trust the value it presents, and I expect I will get values that should not have been converted, converted. Shouldn't the data required to perform the conversion be part of the content? It really is part of the content, is it not? Again, I'm no expert.

Re:We need a new HTML/XML tag for currency values

[Yusaku Godai]

No, sorry, this just doesn't make a shred of sense, at least, not in the context of HTML or CSS.

I'm not saying there's no solution to this, but it doesn't involve adding new features to HTML or CSS.

Vellum Is the Best Archiving Material

[Whiteox]

Forget about all this hollow graphic stuff!
For $18,000 you can buy a lot of vellum (the stuff that very very very old books are made from), or even parchments, and print the 600gb of data onto that! It won't go away for thousands of years!
And, if you find a nice dry cave and some large clay pots, it'll preserve them for thousands of years!

Re:Vellum Is the Best Archiving Material

[arabagast]

yeah, it's only that the restore is such a bitch.

Re:Vellum Is the Best Archiving Material

[Attila Dimedici]

If you want really long term archiving, stone is the way to go. Of course, the data transfer rate is really, really slow. I'm sure someone could come up with a way to automate the process, but I suspect that the data transfer rate would still be pretty slow. Takes a lot of space to store the media as well. But, for all intents and purposes your data will be there forever (at least if you protect it from the wind and running water). On the other hand, you could probably print to vellum with existing technology.

Re:Vellum Is the Best Archiving Material

[Whiteox]

Hey we've got computers that can drive laser cutters, and scanners too!
Frankly, I don't see the problem.

Pedantic...

[msauve]

I obviously meant "proprietary" in the practical sense. CD/DVD, etc. are well documented and have a high level of compatibility across a large selection of manufacturers, both for media and recorders/readers.
Haven't the early patents on CDs (which were introduced to the market in the early 1980's) expired? CD-R was introduced in 1988, so even those patents may have expired (or will shortly), at which point the format will no longer be proprietary, even in the pedantic sense.

In any case, CD and DVD technologies are sufficiently documented to the public that a reader could be made at any time in the future, if needed. Such cannot be said about the storage solution being discussed, which is not publically documented, so a user must rely entirely upon a single private manufacturer for ongoing support.

Google will want a lot of these

[geekinaseat]

Well maybe not this exact product but holographic storage has fantastic pottential for search.

This is STILL just worthless, and vapor...

[sirwired]

This product has been "Coming Soon" for a couple of years now. I think this is the third or fourth time this no-product startup has gotten an article posted on Slashdot. It is slow (180Mb/s is in no way "fast), under-capacity (600GB is a waste of time), overpriced, and unproven. If you want near-line storage, use SATA, if you want archival, use tape. I don't see much of a market for this thing.

SirWired

Re:This is STILL just worthless, and vapor...

[olehenning]

That kind of applied to the CD as well, did it not? The speed will eventually increase. The potential is beleived to be around 1 Gb/s. It might be a couple of years away, but I think this will definately be useful when it arrives. Though this news seems a little less interesting when Holographic Versatile Discs developed by Maxell and Optware go as high as 3,9 TB. So at this point it might be overpriced and slow, but it is not unproven. Give it some time. It's not like it's gonna hit the market for you and me by next week.

Re:This is STILL just worthless, and vapor...

[sirwired]

This product is not aimed at consumers at all. It is aimed at the near-line enterprise storage market. This market segment has never used CD-R's or CD-RW's for this purpose, due to their horrible unreliability and extreme slowness. This product is a replacement for Magneto-Optical jukeboxes, which were quite common for this purpose until SATA arrays took off. Given that SATA arrays keep jumping in capacity by leaps and bounds, and tapes also keep jumping in capactiy and speeds, I don't see this catching up. (1Gb/sec isn't fast at all, even right now, compared to tape, although it is speedier than SATA is today. (SAS has the potential to go a LOT faster though.)) Given that those 1Gb/sec speeds are still theoretical, AND things are already running well over a year late for the first, useless, version, I'm not holding my breath.

Oh, and HVD is still in the vaporware stage, just as this is. That makes holographic storage still quite unproven. (A brand-new radical change in technology fresh off the assembly line does not qualify as "proven".)

SirWired

Re:Holographic Robots

[Tofystedeth]

Though by that time HDs will be cheaper and much faster (especially if they start to include some of this holo tech) I don't think HDDs can use holographic technology. They're completely different storage mechanisms. HDDs use magnetic encoding, holodiscs write using lasers inside a crystal.

Re:Holographic Robots

[Doc Ruby]

At the nanoscale, you'll be surprised how interchangeable are electronics, magnetics, and photonics - all EM phenomena. And how everything useable is a "crystal", however aperiodic.

Where did I hear this before??

[pablo_max]

Seems like I read about the launch of the product each year... Here is just one example:http://www.engadget.com/2005/04/18/inphase -announces-300gb-holographic-discs/ I am sure next year we will here the same...next year, 3TB holo-disks will ship. On a serious note, I can not imagine that banks would use this. They are not normally the guy to adopt techs in the early stages, especially with regards to storing their important data.

Re:I have two words.

[mishagam]

I read current version of LTO drives has 800 GB capacity.
I have problem - LTO drives use single reel cassette - where is the tape go while it is reeled of cassette?

Actually, it only holds 300GB of usable data

[Lucas123]

Actually, while the holographic disc holds up to 600GB of data, half of that capacity will be taken up by error correction software. They also had originally said the product launch was set for July. They must have hit a snag in execution.

Re:Why use discs??

[Easy2RememberNick]

That's what I think too, why use discs? Sure the disc is a common form these days but something better must exist such as a cube or cylinder or maybe interlocking puzzle shapes that could be easily stacked for storage or the actual physical media. Credit card size is not too bad either (Constellation3D had FMD credit card shaped storage). Just design it so the same amount of information could be written to it as a disc, or more.

  Who says bigger is better anyway? Maybe Holographic storage on small types of media such as USB sized storage devices will be more appealing due to it's stability compared to magnetic type storage.

Puts me in mind of SNL

[u-bend]

At that price, it reminds me of a classic Fallon line, to the effect of:
"Yeah, I've got an idea for a car that runs on bald eagle heads and Faberge eggs."

Holographic Storage

[mikethestorageguy]

Why wait for these drives? You can get 60GB UDO media for about $70 list today and the drives cost 1/6 the holographic drives. Plus there are a ton of libraries and appliances available since the drive is standard size versus holographic. Automation of the large holographic drives will be awkward. I think you can get 38TB in one library now from Plasmon. IBM sells some models too.

What avout the price?

[midol]

Indeed, what avout it?

Cost per GB doesn't compete with disks

[bughouse26]

Why would anyone want this instead of just using a $140 500GB sata disk with a WORM emulation software?

Re:Cost per GB doesn't compete with disks

[DigitalSorceress]

Presumably because magnetic media is succeptable to strong magnetic fields, high heat, and general bit-rot over time... So, as long as they can show that this technology really will have a nice long shelf life, I think there's something worthwhile there.

Tapes Still Rule the Day

[Bluecobra]

I really don't see this catching on. I don't think businesses are ready to ditch their tried and true tape libraries for a brand new technology that hasn't been proven in the enterprise yet. It makes much more sense to buy a nice LTO autoloader which can be had for $3000-5000, and 400GB/800GB tapes are around $60 a pop. Tapes can be long lasting given that they are stored correctly. If these holographic drives can reach more competitive price levels, to the point where it's cheaper than an LTO system then we can talk.

Bravo

[oldmacdonald]

I couldn't decide if I should moderate this "insightful" or "funny" so I just gave up and posted.

First Impression After Watching Promo Video

[Deliveranc3]

Hold the camera still!

That is all.

How many?

[jgoemat]

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!

The computer will be cheaper, the media about the same as a hard drive. You can get cheapo 500 gig HDs on pricewatch for just over $100, but $180 is probably the MSRP and the MSRP of those hard drives is probably closer to $150, making it the same per gigabyte. Now you have to compare a device used for archival purposes (where you specifically DON'T want the data to be erased) with a hard drive that you can write over, possibly by accident. While hard drives are approaching the physical minimum distance where magnetism can be reliably used to write to and read from the media, optics have a ways to go especially with holographic media. You would have to have adapters for the drives to let you plug them in and out at will, where you will just put them on the shelf. Is the shelf life for the data on a disconnected hard drive longer than the 50 years for this media? If you want to send the data to someone else, you'd need to wrap up the disconnected hard drive and ship it, plus make sure they have a computer setup with the same interface and with the same file system drivers. It's just not as convenient as a removable media type.

Eleven years ago the company I worked at bought one of the first generation of CD-R drives for $900. CD-R media cost about $5 to $10 if I remember correctly. If this device follows the same trend, in twelve years these would be available for $200 and the disc would cost $1.80.

Re:Holographic Robots

[Tofystedeth]

Ok, granted. However, once it gets down to that I'd argue that we'd be looking at something less like "HDDs using holographic technology" and more like wacky-ass nanoscale EMPhotonic thingy storage medium.
That's a very silly way of saying that it wouldn't be as much one or the other, but something different and better altogether. We can only hope anyway.

Ugh. If they're throwing the public a bone. . .

[Fantastic Lad]

then I have to wonder just what kind of tech is available to the various black-ops agencies. I had some insight into what that world had to play with about twelve years ago. Scary shit, which I only knew about because it was by then hopelessly out of date. But in the public realm, we're not even out of the stone age, relatively speaking.

I remember hearing about holographic technology; back when I was dropping $500 on a 4x CDR drive. And $5 per blank disk. Holographic disk technology was totally viable, and companies were easily able to produce the hardware. But it never made it to market. Gee whiz.

If you step up the technology incrementally, then you get to sell essentially the same device to the same people many times over rather than just once. When people talk about the spirit of 'competition', I laugh. It's a lie. Companies may think they're competing, but the game itself is fixed. Which means competition is just a stage production. Fighting to be the most 'innovative' company using stupid technologies only makes you the best cave man on the hill. Big deal.

Holographic disks were not so much a suppressed technology as they were strategically ignored.

How charming. Isn't living with corporate greed fun? This is why I enjoy not buying new hardware until my old gear has literally fallen apart, and then I only buy stuff which is just about to be phased out so that as few dollars as possible pass from me to the top of the technology pyramid. --I know this doesn't change things much on the large scale, but at least I can say that I don't personally get manipulated into chump-hood like those panting to pay top dollar for the next 'best' 40-year old thing.

Remember how we all used to, when we were kids, imagine living in the high-tech future? Isn't it amusing to think that we would actually be there right now if it wasn't for the military and the corporations who keep us all ignorant and dependant on pathetic technologies?

-FL

Potential customers

[danlock4]

Potential users include banks, libraries, government agencies and corporations.

I'd say that various economically-well-endowed individuals are also potential users. Paris Hilton might want to be able to store her criminal record on a single disc, for example.

Film Industry Usage

[filmotheklown]

Contray to much talk on this board about lack of use, I think this could be huge in the film industry. It's not uncommon for workstations and editors to use terabytes of data when working on a project. At the end of any particular project, you wipe everything off and move to the next one. You don't, as it seems many suggest, simply add more storage to hold archives of the old stuff. Most films are built by sub-contractors, so once the job is done, the key is to REUSE the expensive hardware over and over and over, not simply add to it for each project. Of course the important stuff is backed up to tape or 'printed out' to film negative, but it would certainly be cool to simply back up each bay to a single Disc and then place those in storage versus the large number of DLT tapes currently being used. It's all about the data density for archiving the petabytes of data that now make up a film production.