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Microholography Could Lead to 500 GB Discs
angrykeyboarder writes "Scientists have discovered a way to fit 500 GB of data onto DVD-sized discs. These discs would be created with a process called 'microholography, which combines multilayer storage of data with holographic imagery. From the article: 'Microholography allows data to be stored in three dimensions. The technology works by replacing the two-dimensional pit-land structures currently found on CDs and DVDs with microgratings, which are holographically induced using two laser beams. In other words, instead of recording to a series of bumps and pits like standard CDs, the new technology creates three-dimensional holographic grids that can be used for reading and writing data throughout the physical structure of the disc.'"
... if you scratch one of these? :-
Please no. Can someone tell them to stop working on CDs already? Seriously, HD-DVD is no more than a smaller vinyl. We've got the same technology for over 100 years and they're still trying to "improve" it?
Can someone already remove all the moving (spinning) parts of my laptop? I really do not see the point of including 3 different motors in a XXI century technology.
I've always found DVDs/CDs too large. Yes, they make mini-cdrs and mini-dvds (I used to have a Sony CD Mavica) but they don't have the protective case the minidiscs had. Some things are just ergonomically right, and I regret that we didn't go a little further in that direction.
I don't really like either of them :/
Once your bored of them you can use them as a holodeck in your ant farm :)
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
As good as this sounds, I would rather wait and see. They claim the CDs will be inexpensive to produce, but chances are the reading devices (even more so the reading and writing devices) could cost a small fortune. And what with Blu-ray and HD-DVD fighting it out already...
Not much chance right now interesting manufacturers to produce these.
In Spain we have to pay an average of 40 c. for every 100 megas in DVDs to the SGAE what it is the equivalent of the RIAA in The USA.
...
1. Microholograph?
2. 500 Gb DVDs!?
2.
3. Profit!
...for these disks. Will need 10GB for the movie itself, and 490GB for the DRM software.
-- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...
More storage makes it easier to tak backups but with more storage I will also store more data and then the backups will get larger and.. :(
+1 Agree -1 Disagree
He has a good point. The tech seems cool and all especially for long term storage but solid state is the real future. Battery life is still pretty poor for most devices and many people are moving away from the desktop. I personally don't own a desktop anymore and just hook my laptop up to a keyboard, monitor, and mouse when at home or work. I foresee the desktop dying except for hardcore gamers and servers. If I'm correct then spinning media doesn't make sense. Motors drain battery life and increase latency while throwing in a mechanical cog that can fail.
... a thousand times. The traditional 2D-technology is uncompetitive since the end of the 1990s.
The cutting edge of optical disks are HD-DVDs als BR-Discs with up to 50 Gigs, but even todays
harddisks can store an entire terabyte of data. At the beginning one or two CD-Rs where able to
store the content of a common harddisk, today you would need dozens of expensive BR-Discs to
backup all that stuff. A holographic storage system with 500 Gigs or more should be the past,
not the future. The industry failed at this point. They try to sell us an old, but badly advanced
technology from yesterday.
I hope this is chance for Newcomers. New smaller companies with good and really innovative
products. But my fear is that the power in public relations of the present giants of the market
will prevent it. Wouldn't be the first time that bad technology wins the race.
Come on, we get these announcements every few weeks, but nobody ever delivers a product. This isn't even news for nerds, it is just vaporware. Wake me up when they create a product that I can actually buy.
Optical media is garbage and always has been and is an overly fragile way to store data. It's only redeeming feature is once the discs get bellow $1 they effectively become disposeable.
In another year or so, flash chips will reach a price point that'll make them a cost effective alternative for buying movies on DVD's, they've already reached that point for music CD's.
Once the industry notices that, and gets over their DRM OCD, I say good riddance to optical media.
A company called Constellation 3D developed "Fluorescent Multilayer" disks about 6 or 7 years ago. They even had a working prototype if I recall correctly. Followed the story for a while and then the company went bankrupt due to an investor pulling out (mugs!) Even back then they said they would produce first gen products of 120GB. There's even a WIKI history...... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constellation_3D Surely we should have moved away from a spinning disk by now!
Good! Now let's make two incompatible standards out of it, start a formats war, and sell the same old films to the same old people again, in both formats if possible.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
Interesting....NOT
a qoute from wiki is that it will improve piracy protecion
"HD-DMD enables dramatic improvements in piracy protection, by taking advantage of the multiple layers of information."
They still never learn, what was made by man shall be cracked by man.
I hope they have two new competing formats!
Seriously though, they have been talking about huge storage disks since we discovered round plastic circles. Yeah, they've been getting higher data densities, but if you look at the progression of other storage formats (especially hard drives) optical is just not keeping up. By the time we get 500Gb disks, they'll sound to us much like yesteryear's 40Gb disks sound to us now compared to our 500+Gb hard drives.
lol: You see no door there!
They cost 18K for the drive and $300 for the discs.
They are expensive now, but when they drop they will make it worthwhile.
All of the Simpsons, the Complete Bach, the complete Mozart, the complete Beethoven all together on one disc.
Holographic Memories; Scientific American, November 1995, by Psaltis & Mok
It does make some sense to spin a disk rather than reorient the beam. But a solid crystal holographic storage device not only has lots of locations within itself to store collections of data, but can also be turned on a turntable and have the beam attack it from different directions, storing more data in the same place but at a different angle.
3D holographic storage design has another benefit -- it is self-searching via "reverse" holography. You shine a laser off a target and let it reflect to the memory, and out comes as many copies of the reference beam as their are stored data sets (with a realistic situation of most dissimilar results being buried in noise). Each beam is proportional to the strength of the reference beam according to the similarity of the dataset it came from. You can pick the strongest if you want to find the closest match, or you can statistically test the range of beam strengths to check for uniqueness of the target, or any number of things. The search process is virtually instantaneous, the speed of getting the result limited only by the speed of the measuring and calculating processes.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Not very easy to scratch all the disks at the same time if one is in your office, another in your car and the other at your cousin's place.
480 gig cryptographic keys.
I had a MDH-10, an external scsi-device using 140MB per disc. For more information, see http://www.minidisc.org/md_data_table.html They even had digital cameras use discs! Unfortunately, sony has a bad track record in coming up with their own formats and formfactors.
Harald
500GB is a LOT of data. Great for backups, perhaps for storing raw video footage and so on, but hard to justify for distributing data or for sneakernet uses.
A minidisc equivalent would be what, 100GB or so? That is a very viable proposition. Credit card sized discs would be quite popular too. Solid state equivalence is a long way off.
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
Microholography Could Lead to 999 TB Discs --- well, it could.
I'm willing to say, Microholography Could Lead to 999,999,999,999,999,999 TB Discs. All of these statements are true, yet meaningless.
A frozen pig could fly out of the poster's arse too. well, it could happen, right?
Mod me troll, please.
... as if millions of record company executives suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.
I thought I saw three-dimensional holographic girls
instead of three-dimensional holographic grids.
500GB on one disk? Great! Now I can back up my porn on only two disks!
They had the tech back in 1999 to put 1 T on a disc. The company's disappeared. It was called the Fluorescent Multilayer Disc. They had over 120 patents but went bankrupt for lack of funds/investors after the .com crash.
Their technology was bought out and is now called Digital Multilayer Disk (DMD).
http://www.ddatainc.com/page02.html
But without money the superior tech will likely lose again to either blue-ray or HD-DVD or some other tech backed by the big content providers.
...is that a holography is about to enter consumer market as a practical method to store data. It is beside the point how much data we can store on a single disc just now. Remember floppies? Also, I am pretty sure that holographic data storage can be modified to use no moving parts at all, just a small enough reading/writing surface, strong enough laser beam and a lens or two. If you have ever made a holograph in a physics class, you will remember that nothing was moving there (at least in macro-world) except for your finger on the light switch. I have faith in physicists who work in R&D at major data storage companies. We might even have another format war lurking in the shadows.
I guess the 4 terabyte flash disk will come sooner than I thought. As seen here http://dresdencodak.com/cartoons/dc_037.html
I can't understand why we are still concentrating with disks....
they are NOT good for high capacity and worse for portability...
I mean... disks mean moving parts, which mean less resistance with moving environments... and it adds the mechanic-failure problem, both from the reader and storage part...
and disks can be scratched way too easily... with high-density disks this is even worse, since high-density means less error-recover reading and so on...
500gb... what does it mean, that it can not even be a finger-tip on them?
why don't we just concentrate with flash-like storage and design interfaces with higher bandwith?
they would be have a tenth of the disks problems....
o the pr0n i will save
I am pretty sure that holographic data storage can be modified to use no moving parts at all
Sure, so long as you don't want to store more bits than you have transducers. There's lots of ways to store data in charged or magnetised material with no moving parts: RAM, ROM, core memory. The problem is that you usually need to build a physical sensor of some kind for every bit that you want to store, which severely limits the capacity of the device.
In some cases you can store multiple bits per sensor by having a mechanism to cycle storage locations past a sensor. There's a few approaches here, like acoustic storage (descendants of the mercury delay line in EDSAC) and bubble memory, but they have their own problems.
The closest to a system with "no moving parts" is one that uses a steerable short-wavelength beam in free-space to share a sensor between a number of locations. This can provide a constant increase in capacity per sensor, at the cost of increasing the time required to address a given location. You still need many many sensors to read a significant amount of data.
If you have ever made a holograph in a physics class, you will remember that nothing was moving there
Magnets have no moving parts, either... but you can't read more than one bit per magnet. The illusion that holographic storage would need no moving parts only exists because you're using a high density grid of moving sensors that you're so familiar with you don't notice you're using them.
http://www.issidata.com/shopexd.asp?id=27497
:x
Vendors have been promising us high density compact discs for years, and we have yet to see them make a dent into the market. HVD for instance, which was developed by Optware and announced back in 2004, promised storages sizes up to 3.9TB or more per disc by 2010. So far the only company to produce a product based on the HVD technology has been InPhase Technologies. Their Tapestry unit costs a mere $18,000 USD for the drive and another $180 USD for the media. HD-DVD and Blu-Ray are no exception to this either. If any of these formats are to compete with current storage trends, they will need to become cheap and affordable compared to other forms of storage.
Can someone explain to me how this is any different than the prototype HVD format?
The only problem I see is that at a rate of 200Mb/sec as stated in the article, it would take over 11 hours to fill a 1TB disk!
500GB is a LOT of data. Great for backups, perhaps for storing raw video footage and so on, but hard to justify for distributing data or for sneakernet uses.
When my friend first got a DVD burner, he felt guilty about storing less than 4GB on a DVD-R because it was a waste that was hard to justify.
they've been saying this for years....Fluorescent Holographic Discs, Holographic Versatile Disc, or the Geometrically Encoded Paper Storage
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One of the most "infamous" vaporware is InPhase: http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04
Then it was InPhase and Maxell: http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11
Even Hitachi Maxell's super-DVD (it's just like a regular DVD but with super thin layers.....they plan to make a cartridge with 100 layers to get about 470GB): http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/10
Some more high storage "technologies":
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/09/27/13162
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/12
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/08
Geometrically Encoded paper: http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/11
Anyways, there's been too much smoke and mirrors.
I just want to tell them..... "Show us the money!!!"
How permanent is this storage?
And how long before we can't read it anymore because the technology has crumbled to dust? I have 9-track tapes in my attic which I am reasonably certain are unreadable -- even if I could find a 9-track drive. Not to mention the HD 5.25-in floppies. Even my collection of 3.5-in disks is now gathering dust, and the last bunch of laptops I looked at don't even have those drives any more. You have to buy them as an add-on, and it's only a matter of time before they go the way of the 9-track.
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...whatever the media. No special glasses, goggles or headgear of any kind. (or is it 4D? - 3D "frames" + T) -- "Help me Obi Wan Kenobi"
sigo ergo sum
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_Versatile _Disc
These things are gonna be released in 10 years or less! The maximum is 1.3TB of data!
Not only that they will also make holographic cards too.
Star Trek anyone?
Every so often these stories come out and lead nowhere. What happened to sandwiching CDs and then DVDs together? How many times have we heard about some "third dimension" magic that never materializes?
;) And, a disk should last much longer, since nothing ever touches the surface of the disk, at least not by the reader/writer.
Years ago, "we" all thought that optical media would replace disks. I mean, light is faster, right?
Yet, this tech seems a distant third to hard drives and now flash which is coming up faster. We were also told "back then" that solid-state computers with no moving parts would be the norm eventually. It seems that optical media is being squeezed between ever better, faster and bigger hard drives, and flash memory that keeps getting cheaper and cheaper. I still almost choke when I imagine that I have an SD stick that holds 2gig...
Optical disks remain slow and ridiculous. Does it bother no one else that you can't access a CD or DVD (or I presume the next stuff as well, HD-DVD and blueray) like ANY other media? Why can't I erase my disks?! Hell, even CD+RW and DVD+-RW have limits about erasing. Why can't I just erase a single file, or mount them as drives and access via the filesystem instead of disk-burning software? How ancient and silly is this tech??
PD disks and DVD-RAM were, IMO, two steps in the right direction. Each was erasable. DVD-RAM works like a hard drive - no burning software required, and the disks come in CARTS. When did people dislike carts?? I've read that "powers that be" said NO to any kind of cart for HD-DVD and blueray - great, another generation of trashed media/disposable media.
I've also read about a coating that would make disks virtually scratch resistant, but would add about $5 a pop to the disk. WTF? Why not just use a CART? With a cart, less of the disk would need to go towards redundancy, which for a normal computer CD-ROM is about 100 megs or so, depending on how you look at it (if you write the data as a videoCD for example you get 800megs on a 700meg disk). I refuse to believe that the extra cost/weight/size of a cart makes any difference in the long-run. Had carts remained the norm for CDs, by now, even ultra-slim laptop drives would be able to handle them easily. Further, BOTH sides of the disk could be written too.
Imagine if they would have gone that route - media would have cost more at the start, but have been rock-bottom several years later anyway, yet waste would be greatly reduced. CD could have expanded into 1.6gig formats, 800 for each side - screw the 3D stuff that never happened, lol! And a single DVD might have turned into an 18gig format.
Now, it's too little, too late. Flash will surpass optical media, IMO, making even blueray obsolete before it peaks and hard drives will continue their utterly amazing run for some time to come. Optical media will die like it should.
I remember reading an article about this technology in Laser Focus world. In 1997. It said that the first generation discs, with 1 terabyte capacity, were just around the corner. 13 terabyte discs were about 3-4 years away, but already in the works. This is cool, but I am not holding my breath.
I don't know how many times a disc has become unreadable because the TOC was damaged. You can have all the parity data in the world, if the TOC is gone you're screwed. :(
If only there were a DVD format writable/readable with consumer-grade drives that had multiple redundant TOCs.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
The cost of storage (especially backup) will plummet. Right now I've got 1 TB of storage over 4 external STATA hard drives.
I can't see producing these DVD-like disks to be much more expensive to produce than recordable CDs and DVDs are now. That of coursem is a fraction of what conventional hard drives cost.
Hard drive makers might be running scared when these disks hit the market (assuming they do).
Of course by then, we might have 50 TB internal flash memory as well...
Scott
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