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.'"

Comments

What do you suppose would happen...

[HydroPhonic]

... if you scratch one of these? :-

Re:What do you suppose would happen...

[Feanturi]

I don't know if I need a single DVD-sized disc to store 500GB of data. What I think would be cooler is if that space was made redundant and strewn all over the disc, so I could store maybe 100GB or so (still way lots) and have the peace of mind of knowing that an accidental scratch isn't likely to lose me anything.

Re:What do you suppose would happen...

[anethema]

Seen the Dvdisaster project? It uses some of the space (15 percent by default) as parity data at the image level to make a disc a lot more secure from scratching or other forms of what would otherwise cause data loss. Hell set it to 50 percent and you can pretty much guarantee the disc will be recoverable however badly you scratch it.

Something you might find interesting anyway.

Not again.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Not again.

[UCSCTek]

The fact that moving parts reduce cost by exploiting symmetry is hard to beat. Either you have one/several reader/writer that can move around to access the bits => cheaper, or you hardwire billions into the storage media => more stable.

Re:Not again.

[TheRaven64]

Or, instead of putting the substrate onto a disk, you put it in a cube (or sphere, etc) and use a couple of DLPs to aim the laser anywhere inside the volume. With the rate at which DLPs are dropping in price, this should be fairly cheap in a few years.

On the other hand, at the rate available bandwidth is increasing, there is a much smaller need for portability. With a 4G mobile data network you may as well leave most of your data in a RAID array (where 'D' stands for whatever the densest cheap storage mechanism is) and stream what you need, with a few GBs of local cache. Latency is still going to be a problem, but WAN latency is still lower than optical disk latency in a lot of cases.

Re:Not again.

[ozbird]

They won't be happy until you lose a Library Of Congress in one scratch.

Re:Not again.

[Jeff DeMaagd]

"Seriously, ICs are is no more than a smaller transistor. We've got the same technology for over 60 years and they're still trying to "improve" it?"

Anyways, then don't buy the product. There are notebooks that do not include a built-in optical drive. If you truly believed in a non-motor computer, you can probably get a SSD -based Toshiba ultraportable right now. The problem is that with demanding no motors, you can't expect a fast CPU or graphics processor because that would require a fan to cool them, which is another motor. So that leaves you with a 1.3GHz notebook with 32GB of "hard drive", for over $2000. At least it would look pretty cool and be very light. I think there are Panasonics without motors too.

Research-wise, it's probably not your money to spend. No one can predict what technology will prevail, and the good idea is for different groups to invest in what they are good at, and the market decides what is most desirable for what task. The optical drive will still be mainstream for a while yet, and after that, possibly remain a viable niche for much longer.

I miss minidisc

[misanthrope101]

I wish this type of tech would develop into something in the form factor of the minidisc. I still have my music mindiscs, some of them about 10 years old. There's something about that size, the protective case, and even the colors that makes the form factor interesting. I'd love to be able to have a ~300GB Truecrypt container on a rewritable minidisc-type thing.

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.

Re:I miss minidisc

[DigiShaman]

I blows me away how Sony missed out on the opportunity to use the MD format for data storage. It could have been the perfect 3 1/2 floppy drive replacement. How aggravating that they wasted the chance!

Re:I miss minidisc

[Tim Browse]

They have a pension for failing but you'd be pretty dumb to use it as you're only backup medium.

Penchant.

(I'm willing to let the apostrophe error slide.)

</pedant>

Re:I miss minidisc

[thinkertdm]

I really miss the 8 inch floppies. Don't see why they waste time trying to improve things that spin.

Re:I miss minidisc

[Anonymous Coward]

The MD failed for the same reason the Iomega Zip and similar devices did: companies want to profit in every possible way from their inventions to the point that their patents prevent others from doing anything useful with the technology. This reduces the market until the technology dies and nobody can revive it due to those patents.
I have no data handy about it, but I'm pretty sure the same practice was not applied to hard disks and floppies, otherwise we'd be still saving data to punchcards.

Re:I miss minidisc

[TheRaven64]

I couldn't agree more. The original MD-Data at 140MB per disk was bigger than my laptop drive at the time (60MB). The later revisions, at 650MB and 1GB, are still a nice form factor. If Sony had gone the CD-ROM route of charging a small royalty on each disk and drive, and letting other people manufacture both, then I doubt I'd be using CDs for music today. Three things really killed the format:

• The drives were expensive, and were never included in laptop (where they would have been ideal for backup and data transfer).
• They charged a premium for 'data' disks, even though the music disks also stored digital data, and were identical in every way except for a flag allowing the MD-Data drive to use them.
• They didn't allow the drive to read or write music. CD-ROM drives could play your music through your PC speakers, MD-Data drives couldn't.

The number of Sony products that have failed due to bad management make me wonder if anyone actually owns Sony shares. If I'd owned any in the '80s or '90s I'd have been calling loudly for the board to replace the management.

Data.

[Devv]

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.. :(

Good point

[Uruz 7]

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.

No it won't

[MarkoNo5]

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.

Next steps

[OpenSourced]

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.

New disks...

[g0dsp33d]

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.

You can already *BUY* 300GB discs

[sien]

InPhase Technologies have a system that writes 300GB holographic discs and they have a roadmap that goes to 1.6TB.

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.

Yet more deja vu all over again again

[DynaSoar]

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.

Easy backups

[mangu]

If you scratch one of these you lose 500GB of data, just as with any other 500GB disk. But the fact that you can record 500GB in a CD-like disk means that you can make several copies and store them in separate places.

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.

They DID make data-MD

[Harald Paulsen]

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.

Microholography Could Lead to 999 TB Discs

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

One problem... BANDWIDTH!

[ronhip]

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!