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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.""
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.
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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.
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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.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
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
Because magnetic media fails, badly, often, and at any time.
It is in NO way a long term backup solution.
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
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!
...Obi-Wan Kenobi; you're my only hope!
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.
... holographic storage will be soooo much better for saving pr0n.
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